This is an attempt to help visualize how this game will turn out. These are more of suggestions rather than concrete ideas of how the game should be when it’s finished.
This is the training process. After some time, the AI will pick up on the players fighting style and ask questions about how it should behave in battle.
Here are the power-ups. Some power-ups would work best if they were based on time, others on number of uses.
Of course, power-ups are always more fun when coupled with…power-downs?
These don’t really count as power-ups or power-downs. They merely disrupt the way the players are used to fighting.
These are stat increaser/decreasers. Keeping it simple, we’re not going for WOW.
This is an idea, that might or might not happen. To give the player something to do who’s AI character is fighting, it would be interesting to have them throw crates or any type of hollow item into the field of play. By doing so, it would add more of a random element to the gameplay dynamics. Also power-ups/downs would be in the crates. The crates could be used to knock players around, and there could be either items or rocks in the crates. The rocks could act like walls that could be slowly pushed around, but eventually build up a way for characters to strategically use them to their advantage.
This picture is just the logic to how the basic gameplay elements will balance each other. Parry has an advantage over sword attacks while dodging has an advantage over arrow attacks. The player will have to figure out the best way to attack their opponent rather than just use the same attack over and over again because it’s more effective than all the rest. For example, a player would not be able to continuously attack the other player with a sword because the other player could parry it. But arrows cannot be parried. However, they can be dodged. It would be hard to dodge arrows up close, but arrows take longer to recharge than sword attacks which have no recharge time.
Having an area shove might be good in order to get another player off your back for a few seconds, but it would do no damage and have a slow recharge time so that it wouldn’t be used constantly. The shove could also be used to hit power-downs at an enemy.
A basic character selection concept. Depending on the character type, their sword attacks, arrow attacks, and speed will vary. It might work for each to have a unique special attack that goes through a long recharge time every time its used. Just a thought at this point though.