changes for 5/24/2024

it's been a bit of a struggle working through the current bits of the game. my focus has been on group encounters and trying to bring down the floor of difficulty a bit when working against enemies, so there are a lot of tweaks in this area currently.

first up - Girlfriend adjustments
Girlfriends now try to stay aligned in position with their girlfriend. When a Girlfriend attack is used, they take over on momentum, so air combos will stay perfectly synced in positioning. Close attacks are allowed with girlfriends, and pushback from hits is shared. frame data is more tightly aligned as well; many attacks the ending frame is matched to the girlfriend, and landing lag is inherited. Some attacks cause a link break between the gf and the caller, usually attacks that have a lot of movement tied to them. these are assigned on a case by case basis. Girlfriends can currently take damage separately from the caller, which causes them to be put on cooldown as before, though this is still an interaction i want to do something else with at some point. Girlfriends do have a bullet ignoring property while they are linked to their partner currently, though.

Enemy changes -
Auto-targeting based on the currently active enemy has been scrapped. I didn't like how it would cause odd turnarounds in some situations. currently enemies are allowed to all be active, and i want to have more specialized enemies and layouts with more care put to them to handle unfair scenarios more.
Enemies are only allowed to have 1 defense card at a time. I wanted to try out the pacing if there were no layers that needed to be broken. This is mainly to make getting a break into a group more consistently result in flinching the enemies, rather than putting them into block.
Enemies are allowed to tech out of damage states once their guard break timer has reached 0:01. Since the effect doesn't recover until they get back to neutral, so the damage bonus remains currently.

Damage Tech -
Untech time has gotten an adjustment to the formula. The timing per hit now mainly scales off of attack level rather than damage, and is a little longer generally for light hits and a little shorter to much shorter for heavier attacks. An example is many blood samurai attacks now have a significant tech window before they can hit with another attack. Enemies are more eager to tech out when it is available as well. Overall, combo escapes should be more frequent.
And extra effect with this is when a second character (not tied to the first, such as with girlfriends) attacks a character, the untech time takes a large penalty, so in group fights, when Suu takes damage from more enemies, the untech time should shorten by a lot, allowing for more escape chances in such scenarios. Relatedly grounded hitstun states like flinch and stagger now use untech time as part of their ending timing, which should help with attack strings that keep the target grounded from being able to link infinitely.

Heat Burst -
heat burst is going under a little bit of change, as burst may as well now that techs have been made stronger. Heat burst now does a burst hit around the user that launches enemies on hit, similar to red cancel.

Slopes -
collisions for platforms have been adjusted to allow for sloped platforms. one resulting change for this is that characters no longer cling onto ledges, and can freely walk off the sides of platforms. there is potentially some work to be done here to allow _some_ effects to keep characters clinging onto ledges. due to the nature of how platforms but up next to each other of various thickness with platforms, the ledge detection has a lot of error introduced

Parrying -
Suu's parry window has been extended to up to 24 frames on the ground, and parries can now catch low attacks if the player is holding down on contact. High and low hits on the player that aren't guarded correctly are just unblockable and no longer cause the guard crush effect.

from here i have some more work to do with enemy ai, as i have an effect for being able to have them play with boundaries/leashes better, and need to clean up some detection for enemy reversals and counter attacks. with the better syncing for girlfriends as well, i feel better about trying to figure out Gaji and Momiji's movesets. Gaji I wanted to have use puppet-style attacks and Momiji to use movement support focused abilities, so having a better framework to work off of with the synced movement is helping to clear up the design space i want for them.