Link to demo which covers the first level (no boss yet): /itch/potatoptarmigan/alawt

I'm developing an action horror game where almost everything even the combat, relies on both characters. The combat is in real time, with a simple control scheme and a slowdown function to allow players to easily control both characters at once.

Some background info:

Story summary: An unknown event merges strange beings and objects from other dimensions into a biology lab. The story follows a slowly mutating security guard named Sera and a junior scientist, Lea in their attempt to escape. To make matters worse, a mysterious entity has latched onto the remainders of Sera's left arm. While it's given her a boost to healing as well as strength, there are some yet to be known side effects.

Combat: There are different attack effects when attacking with Lea's variety of weapons. For example, one specific weapon allows Sera to pull off a fast kill. Sera's attacks with her sword arm weaken enemies, resulting in them taking more damage from bullets. Unfortunately, Sera mutates per hit so you can't just hang back and let her do all the work. I like flashy action combos in my action games, so I brought some of that to this game. 

Puzzles: Some of them require the usage of both characters in possibly unexpected ways. 

Any feedback is heavily appreciated! At one point I'll probably cover design considerations since there were a lot of things I had to think about when designing the controls. In the past I received some concerns (from people who hadn't played the game) that a dual character game would be hard to control or overwhelming. I'm currently working on the boss for the first level.

I'm currently working on the first boss. The first step was figuring out Godot's IK system. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a stretch option out of the box, so I tacked a script onto the skeleton to allow for that.

Here's an image of some of the assets for the boss fight that I made a while ago.

I've been brainstorming local co-op implementation. I need to add much needed controller support. Sera's current controls all trace back to a single node in the scene tree. She's entirely controlled by the right mouse button, and in a coop game the Sera player would default to the controller. I think players should have a choice of an extremely simplistic control scheme (point and click) like in singleplayer (this one will show up first since it's a fairly simple tweak) or more fine grained control (joystick directly controlling movement + buttons) to allow for different preferences. 

I've also been thinking of further reducing required dialogue, even in the intro, so players can get to the action/gameplay faster. Maybe throwing players into a fight immediately so people can get a feel for the combat up front.

Been working on a new enemy. A mix of IK and actual animation so that it can accurately target the players.

Working on instantaneous enemy spawning for the boss fight. Revisiting Sera's health loss, I'm going to remove it from basic attacks and it'll only come into play for special attacks.

I'm making some progress on the first boss fight. I spent a lot of time (more than I would've liked) debugging issues with inconsistent hit detection, which I think came from Godot's raycast being used against an Area3D. It wouldn't detect it sometimes. I found a workaround and now the hit detection is 100%. 

Also trying to move the shapecasts using IK + my custom stretching script for these new enemies did not work either. This was due to Godot not updating skeleton positions within PhysicsProcess. Apparently it's a complicated and unwieldy process to get those positions. I found a workaround for that as well, and it works fine.

Spontaneous enemy spawning is working now, but I still have a few more features for this fight I want to add. My plan is for Lea to take care of the enemies coming in from the front, but there are going to be threats from behind the platform as well.

Development should be a lot smoother now that it's more routine stuff that I'm familiar with.

The boss fight code is about 80% finished. I'm also designing a new skill for Sera that players will be making use of during the fight. Still have pretty much all of the art assets to texture and still need to design the look of the new enemy.

I am also refactoring the entire the very old and terrible character controller code. This is necessary for co-op functionality since I plan for the 2nd player to be able to hop into the game with the click of a single button. It's also needed for weapons/environmental effects that will be able to affect entity movement and other statuses. With the new changes it should be a lot easier to implement new movement abilities and status effects.  The refactoring is about 50-60% done.