Original Post
CODA (Warning, image heavy. :v)
(YOU DO NOT NEED UT3 TO PLAY THIS GAME)
So CODA is a third-person stand-alone game recently transferred to UDK, with gameplay revolving around using swords (and two axes.) It takes one hit to die, meaning it is a very challenging (yet still fun) game. It's very fun, but not many people play it. It's not very popular, so Eleeleth and I are teaming up to get it a little more mainstream. To give y'all a vague understanding of the game, I'm going to copy and paste stuff from the wiki. Enjoy.Customization
In CODA, there are four different character models to choose from. After you choose a model, you can tweak the colors of their hair, eyes, and clothes to your specifications. These changes are purely cosmetic and will not affect gameplay whatsoever. There are also ~13 swords and 2 axes to choose from. Some have longer range but take longer to swing, some have shorter range but take less to swing, and the rest are basically balanced and chosen based on how they look. You can also change the colors of the weapon.
The Controls
* Swords can be swung about by quickly click dragging mouse motions. You can drag the mouse in any direction while holding down either mouse button to Slash.
* If you quickly click and release without moving the mouse, the character will attack with a jab.
* If you hold down the mouse button, the character will block.
* Tapping a directional key twice executes a quick dodge. Tap and holding W to allow your character to sprint.
* You can press F at any time to put your sword away and begin using ranged Xing attacks, which are performed just like sword slashes.
You move the mouse to look around, WASD to move, and click and drag to attack. But that's not all. That 'Xing' thing above is a kind of magic that can either be thrown at people or transferred onto your weapon to give it a special ability.
Xing and Xing-Related Effects
There are five different kinds of elements in CODA; nature, fire, earth, sky, and water. These elements can be thrown at enemies as ranged Xing attacks, or can be used to make your weapon cooler, as stated previously.
* Xing also kills with a single hit... so be even more careful!
* There are 5 different element types you can create once your sword is put away. Dragging the mouse in different directions creates Xing of different elements.
* Xing is about disrupting and mixing up normal sword combat, it can help you control space through a match.
* Fighting a battle entirely with Xing is not recommended, but a skilled player could make it happen.
* Skilled opponents can bat your Xing out of the air with their swords, so try to catch them unprepared.
* Xing can grow in size. Be careful when trying to strike a larger than normal Xing out of the air, your sword will only absorb a single normal sized Xing per slash.
* Pay attention to the Xing wheel (press F1 to view this in game). If you have an element on your sword which feeds the Xing type you are slashing, you will only increase the strength of the Xing you meant to destroy!
This is the Xing wheel that you see in-game. The different kinds of attacks and its counters are also shown, but are un-related to the elements.
Whiffing! :O
There is a mechanic in CODA called whiffing; I'll let the wiki explain it to you.
Players who swing without hitting anything are penalized should they choose to swing again immediately. You'll find that inexperienced players do this frequently without realizing it. It makes them extremely vulnerable to a counter attack.
When a player swings and hits nothing then immediately swings again, white particles will appear around an attacker's sword hand. This shows that he has whiffed.
If the attacker waits for the first swing to complete in full before making the second attack, he will not whiff - the white particles will not appear and he will not be penalized.
As you probably already noticed, slashes require a small amount of warmup time before they become dangerous to opponents. Even though swings are not dangerous to opponents during warmup time, warmup can intercept an opponents strike against you. During warmup time, your sword trail will be blue rather than red. Even if you swing slightly after your opponent, your blue trail will be able to clash with his (preventing your death) even before it would have been able to do damage to him.
By slashing immediately after a missed attack (whiffing), this window of safety during the warm up is sacrificed, and you must wait until the sword trail becomes red to clash with an opponent. So anytime you see that whiff effect, you know there will be a much larger window of vulnerability. You'll know you took advantage of an opponent's whiff vulnerability when you see the red confirmation effect as in the image above.
The end result is that players who choose to wildly spam their attacks (the Blender technique) are actually very vulnerable.
'An example of Whiffing:'
I press, drag and release the mouse button. Attack begins.
* 1 second of Warmup: the animation begins, sword trail is BLUE
* 1 second of Heat: the attack is dangerous to people, sword trail is RED
* 1 second of Recovery: the attack is no longer dangerous, but not yet returned to the default standing pose, no sword trail
If a player swings, waits 3 seconds, then swings again there is no whiff - just 2 completely separate slashes. If a player swings and then immediately swings again, the the input will buffer and wait until the Warmup and Heat phases complete. Then it will execute during Recovery. So a whiff slash does come out faster (after 2 seconds instead of 3) than a normal slash by skipping the Recovery phase. The Femur sword has the special ability of "avoiding whiffing" by simply delaying your input until the full 3 seconds has passed. An expert player would be able to simply time his input perfectly and have no need of this special ability.
tl;dr don't swing your sword too much, it'll screw you up and you WILL get counter-killed.
Elemental Sword Abilities
A large part of CODA is the elemental sword gameplay. Basically, if you hit 'f' to sheath your sword, click and drag to the element you want, then hit 'f' while clicked over the element of you choice, the element will be transferred to your sword. The wiki has more on the types of elements and their abilities, which are triggered by attacking with the right mouse button:
* Earth slows your attack and movement for a brief period, but will ragdoll and throw any opponents you clash with... unless your opponent stuns you on the clash. It also increases your weight, causing you to fall quickly.
* Sky reduces your speed and gravity for a short time, allowing you to float through the air. Its tricky, but you can do a WaveDash by executing a forward Dash during a whiff.
* Fire creates a short lived fire Xing attack that will spawn on your character and inherit your velocity. Really dangerous if you can coax them into hitting your opponents.
* Water will reflect the movement of thrown Xing. As a bonus, having water on your sword will kill any player who hits you with the fire Xing attack from a fire sword (no need to swing to activate this ability).
* Nature can grow trees from whatever surface you are looking at. The trees block players from moving through them and allow you to stand on and jump off of them. Overslash will create a special glowing tree (the glow is only visible to the creator). Once a glowing tree exits, RisingSlash will cause you to teleport into the glowing tree. Be careful, if opponents slash your glowing tree, you'll take the hit for it.
If you have really good timing with the sky element, you can wavedash, sheath your sword, re-select sky, and wavedash before you start falling. This is tricky, and can take a while to get the hang of. WOAH KITFOX, YOU CAN WAVEDASH? IS FUNNY TO ME
Summary
CODA is the kind of game you really have to play in order to understand. It's insane, fast-paced, and will keep you on your toes. The only downside is the lack of servers/people. The only server is a Chicago-based dedicated server that is, sadly, down at the time I write this. We've gotten by by having Eleeleth host his own server, but it's pretty inconvenient for anyone not in America/Canada. Oh yeah, and press 'Q' to get on a robotic horse. Because you can.
Videos, because this thread isn't big enough already:
(the tf2 remix is pretty neat in the beginning)
(pretty intense)
(the guy who makes these videos is awesome)
And that's basically all I've got. Hope to see you in-game! Love, rittu.
Last edited by rittu; Feb 5, 2011 at 04:22 AM.
Reason: fuckyouleel
If anyone remembers determinance. This is that concept done right.
And deridor: If you can run UT3, you can run this.
Basically:
System requirements
And KiTFoX is right. This game is ridiculously satisfying.
And deridor: If you can run UT3, you can run this.
Basically:
System requirements
- XP/Vista/7
- 2.0 GHz single core CPU (2.4 GHz dual core CPU or faster recommended)
- 512 MB RAM (1.0 GB RAM or greater recommended)
- NVIDIA 6200 or ATI 9600 video card (NVIDIA 7800GTX or ATI X1300 or faster recommended)
- DirectX 9.0c compliant sound card
And KiTFoX is right. This game is ridiculously satisfying.
<~suomynona> TITS OR ELEELETH
My System
- XP
- 1.73 GHz laptop
- 512 MB RAM
- 3.92 GB hard disk drive space
- ati radeon 9000 video card
- DirectX 9.0c compliant sound card
- Internet (TCP/IP) and LAN (TCP/IP) play supported.
