/agdg/ - Amateur Game Development General

I'm making a zeldaish action rpg that has a lot of the same requirements. Gif is of a boss fight that restricts movement in a way that's kind of reminiscent of a beat'em up. Personally, I'm using C++ with SDL2 and it works well if you're planning in doing everything sprite based (vs 3d models and such.) If you're interested in SDL, there's some really good tutorials here http://lazyfoo.net/tutorials/SDL/index.php

If you go that route, my recommendation is to basically make a setup similar to how you'd approach a zeldaish game, with a square moving around the play area and colliding with the walls, and have the character draw with it's bottom edge flush to that shadow/collision box. Then you can do attacks relative to the box and check the distance between the middle of the player and enemy shadow boxes to determine if attacks hit or not. When it comes to rendering everything, the easiest way I found was to have each object produce a rendering object that went into a vector that was sorted by the maximum Y of that draw command, then drawing from lowest to highest Y.

Hopefully that helps you get started.