Thank you for the detailed response, and congratulations on clearing Louise. Since there's a lot to look at and process here, I can't really give good solutions to everything yet, so I'll just try to communicate my thoughts on the issues and what I can try to improve in future updates.
Stagger:
- Not being able to see stagger values makes it hard to know when a stagger will occur, thus combos need to start with some kind of hit confirm before following up. No easy answers for this one, considering it's partly based on Elden Ring's poise system and that too was somewhat unintuitive.
- It feels unfair if the startup of a boss attack is shorter than the player's recovery after their initial attack attempt, because they can punish the player at no frame cost to themselves. At the same time, I don't want all boss attacks to be so slow and heavy, so I guess I can try to speed up everything and reduce frame disadvantages?
- Poise as yet another bar sounds obnoxious, so I don't think I can do that. But as I said, no solutions yet, so I'll need more time to think about this one.
Floatiness:
- Although you say it rotates first, then moves, it's more correct to say that it rotates while blending towards the movement state over a 0.25s transition period. It does feel more snappy when reducing this value, so I'll try playing around with lowering it to maybe around 0.1, although I'll need to compare how it feels with existing games and see if that makes sense. (I think you're the only one to ever point this out, so I need to decide if it is a real problem, a personal preference, or something that actually makes the game feel better)
- There was some braking to the dodge animation before, but since it got chopped down from 60f to about 40f to blend into sprinting better, that part is not really visible anymore. Initial tweaking makes me feel like it's worse to try and extend this, but I'll need to play around with this more to really decide for sure.
- This part about jumping is a bit more complicated, because there isn't much of a slide here and it's more that holding a direction when landing will cancel straightaway into walking. I think I've also received comments about this in the past that made me add the transition into walking instead of leaving the players stuck in the landing state.
- Most of the root motion movements during attacks are just matching up feet positions, but this is not 100% accurate, and there will be some minute but barely visible foot sliding. Some attacks are definitely worse at this than others, though. It's also possible you might be referring to what happens when the player is right in front of the enemy and there's no more space to move forward, but there's not too much I can do about that. For now, I can just try and review the attacks to reduce the worst offenders.
- Are the charged normal attacks tight-enough for you? If comparing NA to CA, then I can feel that difference, so if CAs are good enough then that gives me a solid target to refer to.
Apart from the stagger issues, I think a lot of the floatiness comments have been unique to your perspective. While I can see how these are problematic, it's unclear how big of a problem they are and whether or not I need to or am adequately able to fix it. There's a lot of tweaking and iteration that'll have to be done to figure that out, but I really appreciate being able to get such detailed feedback from you.