Make howard way better for practice by adding higher difficulties, improving how it responds to atta

[simple lark]

baksoBoy

Howard is extremely limited in its moveset. It always reacts the exact same when you attack it by just moving away. The attacks it preforms are also extremely limited. First of all, even at the highest difficulty the pauses it does between attacks, and when it stops moving, are by far too long. It is also not able to do pillar, since every time it preforms the move the pillar instantly breaks, probably because it is colliding with the track. Another issue is that due to the track having collision, it can be difficult to hit Howard with grounded moves, especially grounded discs. I think that removing collision from the tracks would both help to make sure that Howard's moves come out without breaking, and to make the player actually hit Howard from grounded objects.

I assume that the most logical thing would be to increase the difficulty slider by a couple of values, but maybe there could also exist a seperate slider, since the suggestions I am going to make are quite different compared to how Howard usually behaves, so maybe a toggle would be good? The details on how this should work aren't really that important to this suggestion; you will probably come up with something sensible if you ever plan on including this idea.

Anyways, here are some behavior changes I feel would make Howard way more useful as a practicing aid:

1. The pauses it does between attacks, and when it stops moving should be decreased. For the highest difficulty the pause should probably barely be noticeable. Although maybe different moves have different pause durations afterwards. A heavier attack like "wall" should probably make him have to recover for longer than disc or spawn ball, since having literally every move have a cool-down of for example 1 second would make it flow really weirdly if it does a bunch of "huge" moves at the same speed as trowing discs.

2. Make Howard react to attacks in more varied ways. Instead of just trying to move away from the attack to dod(...)

(...)ge it, it should be able to spawn wall, and spawn pillar. For the highest difficulties it should maybe be able to parry>straight, ground>straight, or maybe even parry>hold right>straight.

3. Make it have a way more varied move set. Howard has a very limited range, and if you put up a wall at a decent distance, it can literally not do anything against you, except maybe uppercutting balls if you are at that exact range. What I feel would be really good to train against (at least at Howard's highest difficulty) would be if he was able to straight>kick walls, since that would cover a very large distance, and which is able to break walls. Another way he could play against the players walls would be if he could utilize explode, and for example do spawn ball>explode>straight, to get rid of the walls. Maybe he could do disc or wall>explode very shortly after, to hopefully hit the player right as their wall falls away. Some more moves he might be able to preform could be hold right, since that would give him way more range, and also makes its attacks way more threatening and fast. It could for example spawn cube>hold right> straight, and maybe even apply explode to it? Another thing it should be able to utilize would be ground. It could for example spawn ball>ground>straight. For the highest difficulties maybe also spawn cube>straight>uppercut, wall>straight>kick (as mentioned before), disc>straight, disc>kick (if you jump).

4. Make Howard have way more situational awareness. If it for example spawns a wall, and moves away from it, it can later sense that there is a wall somewhere close to its track, that it can move behind to be safe from the players attack for a while. It could even potentially start doing spawn ball>uppercut from behind the wall to pressure the player whilst it is safely behind the wall. If the distance between Howard and the wall is too small to spawn a ball, it could maybe straight the wall to give more room for the ball?

5. Give Howard more sp

(...)ace. This idea is definitely quite a stretch, but maybe it would be possible to have Howard (Or maybe a replica of Howard) have its own arena, where it has a completely (or at least almost completely) 360 degree track in a circle, so that it can for instance go around a wall, with a hiding player behind it.

I feel that it is important being able to play against someone who isn't a real life person without the difficulty of it being absurdly easy. Personally sometimes I get a bit stressed from playing online, and I just want to relax offline, but still have it be difficult and fast enough for it to be interesting. As of right now, whenever I play against Howard I barely ever attack. Most of the time I just stare at it for what feels like ages, until it attacks where I can try to block it and counter. Nothing even remotely interesting is happening.

I just created my account for canny.io, and I am not able to change my username. If I have still been unable to do so in the future, I want to just mention that my username should be baksoBoy, and if you were to for some reason want to contact me, my Discord username is baksoBoy#0001, and I am a part of the Bucket head Entertainment Discord server. Thank you for reading through this long suggestion! I really appreciate it!

SDRAWKCABMIAY_YT

I agree that Howard should be improved and expanded upon!

I would personally love to have a way to set him as a "pitcher" robot that just does whatever combo I input on a loop so I can practice different defense techniques for different attacks!

[simple lark]

NQ9OC7AUKF68

Just my two cents, in my case, he performs pillars correctly