Now that the basic movements are more or less done, I can start improving the punches.

First up: direction of the attack animation.

Fighters have different attack animations defined in the Fighter Editor (neutral, upward, downward, forward, and backward).

There are two possible ways to handle this:

1. Manual method
The fighter’s attack animation corresponds to the direction the player is pressing when the attack button is pressed.

2. Automatic method
The fighter detects the closest enemy and automatically launches the attack animation that aims toward them.

Both methods should be easy to implement. Which one do you think would work best?

Im personally biased towards manual because it gives more freedom to the player for strategizing

Also, an idea I thought of is having directional attacks triggered by pressing the corresponding key (manual method), but with the addition of some sort of detection system, where the player would launch itself to a nearby opponent if it is in the direction of the attack.

I think the automatic method works better, just because the player can't control everything they need to.

Manual method might be best with a joystick, but it doesn't work with arrow keys. The enemies aren't just approaching from the 4 cardinal directions, they can approach from any angle. If an enemy is approaching from a 45 degree angle, making the player choose a split-second decision whether an up-attack or a side-attack is more fitting isn't really fair or fun. Since the arrow keys can't account for every possible direction to attack, I think the engine should handle stuff on its own, and make adjustments as needed.

This issue is going to appear again once projectiles are added in. Even moreso than with close-range attacks, a player can't choose exactly what angle to fire a projectile using arrow keys, when the enemies are going to be approaching from diagonal directions. Nobody would ever land their attacks. In fact, I bet it'll be more likely for the AI to accidentally dodge into an attack and get hit, then get hit because the opponent aimed at them. I think, just like with the old BASTON and with Devolution, the engine should auto-aim unless the enemy gets behind you when you're charging up.

Personally, as a side-note, I do still think some sort of lock-on button to choose which enemy to face and focus on could be useful. Maybe pressing it could focus you on the closest character to you, and pressing it again could sequentially select further out for every character currently visible on screen? And if the targeted character went off-screen, it would give you a small arrow at the edge of your screen to let you know what direction your opponent is in? And maybe if you got attacked by some other character it could automatically shift to them instead? IDK, I'm just suggesting stuff.

As explained, it's just an animation meant to hint at the direction the fighter is attacking... If the fighter is well made.

I’ll start by adding automatic direction, since that’s what the AI will be using.

We’ll see if that’s good enough for the player. 😉

As for the lock or not, this will be for later.

I added the automatic direction for the attack animation. It's already nice.