For this Dev Talk, we bring you a Q&A session about the hot topics from Pre-Alpha! Please look forward to the three Q&A sessions starting this week, the dev team will respond to feedback, questions, and suggestions that we’ve received from our players!

Q1. No dedicated button for sprinting? The sprinting function doesn’t feel very fluid, maybe you need to add a toggle button or make some changes.

A: Sprinting has gone through the greatest number of testing and changes. There were times when we set a toggle on/off run key, placed stamina on sprinting, and had sprint mode activated when a key was being pressed.

We had hoped sprinting would be useful for players to move fast during the farming stage and also allow players to run into each other to fight. This was in line with the gameplay of fast-paced action and battle that Squad Battle is pursuing to achieve.

When a player runs into an enemy squad, they need to be able to immediately activate their weapon skills. But in that moment, players have to juggle between rotating the camera angle, moving, and using skills, so having an additional toggle key for sprint mode would feel too inconvenient. With that in mind, we decided to turn it into the auto-sprint system that we have now.

The dev team had intended sprinting to be used only in out-of-combat situations. If sprinting was another factor that can be freely used during combat, it could lead to an exhausting situation for both parties as they chase and run.

We’re still in the middle of testing and there is plenty of room for improvements. We’ll continue to look into different opinions and come up with a better direction.

Q2. The character movement doesn’t feel smooth and some skills don't work as they should (skill cancel etc.,). Are you planning to work on them?

A: The biggest direction we were pursuing with Squad Battle was having a movement that players can manipulate as freely as possible. There were many challenges and the dev team went through several trial and error with different R&D on having the character's upper and lower body move separately and implementing natural movement motion when characters moved while using a skill.

We planned to have all skills cancelable at any point, but it was difficult to implement this for certain skills due to the way the basis of the skill motion was structured.

We’re currently working on this matter and hopefully, we’ll have smoother skill cancellation and combo manipulation during the next test. Lastly, we’re working to improve the overall quality of the animation to make it more smooth and natural. Make sure to check them out during the next test!

We’ll be back with more Q&A next time.
Thank you!