CRACKSWORD

CRACKSWORD
A gritty 2D sword dueling game with physics and pencil-drawn surreal fantasy vibes. Two warriors. One sketchy battlefield.

Passionate about video games since the NES era, and always dreaming of making one someday. I discovered Godot not long ago after secretly spending years playing around with modding tools and game engine tools.
Cracksword started as a way to learn Godot, and ended up completely consuming my free time in a happy way. As i am mainly a metalworker/welder and musician expect slow updates and many bugs, solo dev is rough!

This is the very first alpha I’ve ever dared to release publicly, and I’m really excited to hear your thoughts! 

*** GENERAL INFOS ***

Gamepads are detected and assigned automatically (joypad1 = player 1, joypad2 = player 2). Without a controller, the game is playable using keyboard and mouse. Right now, you can’t play player 1 on keyboard/mouse vs player 2 on a controller — that combo isn’t supported yet.

At the moment, you can fight solo or 1v1 in local multiplayer, choose between 3 unfinished levels and a few characters. There's a kill counter but no game over screen yet. You can toggle AI in the player selection menu to watch the game play itself. "Random HUE" and "Default HUE" let you change the character’s color.
All characters currently share the same skeleton/animations, with slightly different body part weights.
Also lot's of  placeholder for now...

*** GENERAL TIPS ***

• It’s a slower-paced directional fighting game — you need to block in the direction of the attack and manage your positioning.

• Red bar = health

• Yellow bar = stamina (used for attacks, jumps, dashes)

• Green bar = dash status indicator (full = can dash)

• If stamina is in the red, you can’t attack/jump/dash

• You regain a bit of stamina with each successful block

• Stamina regenerates slowly over time

• Perfectly-timed blocks = perfect parry = opponent is stunned + you automatically counterattack

• You can charge your attack — the more your sword glows, the higher the damage

• The more you overlap the sword with the opponent’s body, more the damage

• Damage is temporarily boosted if you attack right after a parry

• Stars = "stunned" status, can’t attack while stunned

• Getting hit mid-attack stuns you

• The sword isn't physical, but bodies are

• The "back attack" pushes and stuns the enemy, and cannot be blocked

*** CONTROLS ***

[Keyboard & Mouse]
Q/A = move left
S = crouch
D = move right
SHIFT = dash
SPACE = jump
MOUSE = aim (relative to torso)
LEFT CLICK = charge / release attack
RIGHT CLICK = block / cancel attack
ESC = pause (in-game)

[Gamepad]
LEFT STICK = move / crouch
RIGHT STICK = aim (attack/block)
LT = block / cancel attack
RT = charge / release attack
LB = jump
RB = dash
START = confirm (menus) / pause (in-game) 

Known bugs in this alpha version:

• Characters can get their feet stuck in the ground in the forest level → fix: pause + reset

• Attack input may stop working if the opponent respawns during apply_stagger() → fix: pause + reset

• Sometimes the sword hitbox doesn’t activate if you attack too soon after a parry

• Mouse may stop working in the pause menu → workaround: use arrow keys + Enter

• If gamepad doesn’t work on the main menu → use mouse instead

• if UI is bugged with mouse, try use keyboard arrows/enter

• Controllers vibrate even when the player is AI-controlled

I haven’t tested the game on many machines. It was unplayable on my old PCs/laptops without a dedicated GPU. On older systems, it might be missing libraries or throw errors if Vulkan isn’t supported.

For older PCs, you can launch the game with the following command line to disable a few things and switch from Vulkan to OpenGL — but be warned, I haven’t optimized anything, and there’s still a lot of messy stuff in there from testing:

--video-driver opengl3 --rendering-method gl_compatibility --disable-crash-handler

Cheers!