Dueling system

We face an important problem when thinking aboutt he duels against the other virtues: the player´s attack methods are very limited (jump and stomp) and the ones provided by the powerUps may be too powerful and break the fights (Astral Palm and Ninja Star). With jumping, we risk having to make the enemies invulnerable through most parts of the fight, which may not be a good decission. We must think of a system to make the fights more engaging, limiting enemy invulnerability to the minimum so players feel the game´s not cheating and they have freedom to try different tactics instead of following a rigid instruction set.("attack now", "defend now").

Megaman games do this really well. Usually you can attack the boss at any moment, but you risk getting hit in return if you choose poorly. This allows for players to develop their own strategy and even have fun refighting bosses to try new things. Megaman bosses (and Megaman himself) have a life bar, so this style of many-hits to win fits the game nicely. Kitsune doesn´t use that and instead will utilize a reduced number of hit-points, with 3 differentiated phases in each fight. This way, bosses will be able to sustain 9 or 10 hits and every hit is more important than individual shots in Megaman games (specially in old ones where there was no charged shot).

One solution is to use charged attacks. These force the player to evade the enemy attacks for some time until the charge is complete, so there´s no need to force enemy invulnerability. We can make enemies require charged attacks of one PUP or the other (or make them required in the mechanic used to deal damage in the fight) so the player can choose the moment to dish out damage.

The powerless state doesn´t have a charged attack, so if the player looses all PUPs he´ll need a way to get them back. We should insert in every sequence of the boss patterns a opportunity to get a PUP from one of the boss attacks. Some general ideas:

• For bosses using projectiles, some projectile can be colored differently. Instead of evading it, if the player jumps on it it will spawn a PUP.
• The boss may spawn some blocks to alter the level´s layout, we can hide PUPs inside of them, so if the player jumps to the correct one he´ll spawn one.
• Look dispenser: Have a dispenser that will spawn a PUP when the player looks at it. It takes some time so the player must find the correct place and moment to stand still and look at the dispenser long enough without getting hit.

This way we can lock the duel in different phases and force the player to get flawlessly through each sequence of them, or risk it all by going kamikaze style and having to get new PUPs constantly, with the added tension of being vulnerable almost all the time.