Our last post was at the end of September, so it's time for another! This time we'll be showcasing new particles, a new enemy, and a bunch of UI screenshots.

Particles

Our first boss, The Child, now has particles for his swings, smashes, footsteps, and hits against the player characters.

Red, Ela, and Akardo all have at least one move they can charge up, so we spruced up their respective particles for those attacks.

Placeholder particles for the restricting walls of encounters have been replaced.

Resting at shrines has also received a particle upgrade.

New Enemy

A character you'll meet later on in the game, Voi, has his own legion of soldiers. They feature a unique mechanic where they'll fade into the background and reappear to attack the player. Suspenseful!

UI Overhaul

Our menus have been placeholder for a while, so here's a collection of screenshots that feature new assets in-game! There are still a few placeholders. Slowly but surely, we'll have final art throughout the game!

Inventory

Vendor...

Hey everyone! We've been busy integrating some new systems into the game all the while Mike has made good progress on some characters' models and textures. We've also internally initiated "Operation Fisher-Price" in which we pass over any preexisting systems that aren't as easy to use as we would like them. After hopping around the project, it can get confusing to revisit older systems.

This post will show some footage of our new systems, and the art progress we've made since the last blog update.

• Encounter System

This system lets us set up an area into a full-fledged fighting zone. We can spawn waves of enemies over time, limit the play space, and create boss fights with it.

• Shrine Menu System

Our world traversal will feature teleportation between save points.

• Dark frag modeled/textured/implemented

A new enemy class! These guys grab and deal damage over time, all while looking incredibly ominous. Press enough buttons while grabbed, and you'll break out!

• Child almost c...

It's been two months since our last blog post, and a good amount of changes have taken place in the project! We've made several passes over our first level. The environments' setdressing, interactive setpieces, and enemies have all been tweaked. Work-in-progress sound effects have been implemented on one out of the three playable characters.

Here are some clips of the level.

Throughout the level are interactive objects like doors, breakable objects, items, lifts, ladders, and more. Some interactives have their own camera set ups. Here's a few clips of them in action.

We're testing out a bunch of items to see what sticks. The usual stuff like health recovery, stamina recovery buffs, and an item to warp you to your previously used checkpoint are in. Above the basics we're experimenting with channel-type items that have powerful effects. For example: slowing time for nearby enemies.

Teleporting back to a shrine

Time Slow in action

Hit cancelling has gotten some love and now boasts a post proces...

Pushing forward! These past three months have been full of polishing and refinement in both the gameplay and art fronts. We're on the cusp of being where we want to be before deep diving into level design and creation. Mike's brother Ryan started working for us in the beginning of the year, and has been busy with extensive gameplay analysis/tweaking as well as tackling all the smaller but still-important tasks.

Gameplay-wise, the enemy NPCs' logic has been combed through and iterated upon. Pathfinding bugs and the numerous AI oddities have been getting ironed out one-by-one. We added some additional animations for transitional states that make our NPCs smoother level travelers, as well as animations for the player traversing through doors, an idea we've been toying with to add depth to level design.

Combat logic adjustments give the NPCs more agency and make them feel more threatening and punishing; it's helped ramp up the game's difficulty, which we can now bala...

 Now that most of our gameplay mechanics are done, we've started to just focus on content creation.  Characters, enemies, environments etc.  The fun stuff.

Mike finished up the Rotten enemies, and we got the animations polished and threw them in the game.  They look good and we're pretty happy with the way they turned out.  They'll be mini-bosses so I hope the players enjoy fighting them.  They have a pretty tricky AI.

Here's a render of the model

And here he is in engine

 and here is his animation set.

We started to revisit concepts as well.  This one of some special civilians was done quite a bit ago but we're attempting to get some freelance help so we're trying to fill in details that a freelance artist would need if we manage to outsource anything.

A pause screen finally got implemented.  We had a pretty hilarious placeholder for awhile and I'll definitely miss it but this was a nice addition to make the game actually feel real.

 We created some lower end enemies we n...