Devlog #1 | The Start of Saikyou

The Start

This is the first Devlog for the game "Saikyou". I have been working on this for over a year now.  I didn't have a lot of time first. I worked on short Protoypes which focused on the concept of "having many enemies surround you". Those enemies could attack you any time, theoretically all at the same time. First I thought you should be able to control their behaviour.  But with 20 to 30 enemies planned for endgame fights, that is not a manageable task for the player. I made enemies more counterable. They got long windup animations for their attacks which you can react to. The player would therefore be able to react to their attacks BUT this also meant I needed to give the player a lot of control over their character.

The Last 6 Months

In January I started to work on this full time. The player now has a lot of abilities to express themselves with. They can 3 hit attack combo, triple dash, shield with which they block enemy attacks, parry, counter, roll, heal, IAI draw and more abilities are planned for the future. I made the player as expressive as I could. I want a lot more but I also have to be realistic and work on more important things.
I created a lot of code and it works really well. I can now create enemies and give the player new abilities really fast. Also a lot of groundwork has been dealt with, so future updates will be a lot about design instead of coding.

The Last Month

A month ago I finished the first playtest and got a lot of really helpful feedback! Here is what I worked on since then.

• The trello board I use is now public, I also updated it. I took out old stuff and structured it better.
• Art updated. New shader is used which allows us to draw over the spritesheet in values. The brighter the value the more that pixel will
  glow with the HDR using shader. Also everyone has their own material now. TLDR Everything looks a lot cleaner and more appealing now. 
• Movement is worked over because it felt weird in specific situations. This was the remainder of old thinkgs I removed. I didnt adjust the movement up to now though. 

• Added "Energy" as a ressource.
  • Over time it empties while your shield is active otherwise it fills up over time.
  • The counter and the roll have energy costs.
  • When the energy is below 0 the shield breaks and you can no longer shield.
  • The shield is no longer broken once your energy is full again.

• New Abilities
  • Dash
    • already existed and I really liked it. So I made it into a triple dash like marios triple jump. 
    • With the right timing after dash 1 you can do dash 2.
    • Dash 2 has more range and is a little bit faster. 
    • Dash 2 can do the same and go into dash 3 with the right timing for a really long dash
  • Roll 
    • is a movement ability similar to dash. It covers the same distance in about the same time. 
    • To do it you need to shield and then press the dash button. 
    • It costs energy
    • You can go in any direction though! Also you will face the direction your going now.
  • IAI Draw
    • While holding down the Y button you can aim in any direction.
    • When you release the button you fastly move in the direction you are looking at.
    • During this quick movement you are invincible and hurt anything that you touch.
    • At the end of this move you fastly slice enemies with your IAI draw.
    • Costs Mana

• Abilities Overworked
• Healing 
• was possible at any time and everywhere. This lead to a behaviour of "running and healing". I really disliked this as it wasn't fun.
• Now healing is only possible inside of the red circle in the center of the map.
• Healing costs mana

• Old Ability Removed
  • 360 Attack
    • This attack is possible when countering an enemy attack. You do that when blocking an attack quickly after pressing the x button.
    • But you were also able to do this by holding down the x button for long enough. Once you released it, the 360 attack would come up.
    • This existed before the counter move, but the counter is almost the same and just better in any way. Apart from having energy costs. Therefore I removed it.
• Mana
• is a new ressource I addded.
• Mana is gained when killing enemies.
• It is used for healing and strong abilities like the IAI draw. I will create more of them in the future.

• Wave / Spawning Sysyem
  •  I never intended to make healing free. This game will become a roguelike so healing being a free thing doesn't make any sense to me. I do want healing to be a constant possibility which is hard to pull off. At the same time I want to give time in which healing is possible. Because of that I added breaks after a wave ends.
  • I wanted it to be possible to heal in these breaks because there are no enemies which would stop you from healing.
  • The problem is that I never intended to show the player when a wave "ends". I made them end while enemies are still alive, with that I was able to give them a nice pacing. For instance I could say "End this wave when 15 enemies are still alive and spawn another 15 in -> The intensity never goes down and never allows the player to calm and instantly gives him another big amount of enemies. I really like this pacing but for this to be possible and the waves to have breaks, I will need to recode the Wave system in the future a little. I wanted to do this anyways as I now clearly know what I want from the spawning system and how I want to structure the waves.
  • Waves will have x amount of enemies in them. They will not spawn them all at once, they will have certain conditions "strong enemies are all dead -> Spawn y more enemies".  " only y enemies alive -> spawn z more" "keep y enemies alive, so as soon as 1 enemy dies, spawn another one" ... and so on. This way I can give waves different paces and give my best at structuring this game in a way that it keeps being engaging, while not just getting you out of breath with nonstop action, followed by you killing the remainder of the enemies. I think that is boring and I can do more.
  • For now a six second break when a wave ends is a thing. The enemies that are still alive get "deactivated". This means you can kill them. I like the choice I give you here. Either kill someone strong, or heal up. But in the future there will be no enemies in this and I will play around with healing and make this break a pure "breathing" time after a lot of action.

• Particle Systems
• Shield breaking is an important thing and we created multiple particle systems that make sure that you know what just happened.
• I also added a particle system for healing.

• Reflecting Bullets 
• is now a thing. Hit them or block them to do so.

• Enemy Design
• I thought a lot about the current and future design of enemies. What makes the game what it is and what I want it to be. After doing all this I came up with some rules for enemy design. The most important ones are:
• Simplicity
  • At first enemies had been really complicated with lots of different behaviours and left players confused. I now limit each enemy to one type of behaviour. Either they run away from you, chase you, wait for you to come to them or something else. They have one behaviour and not even one more! On the other hand bosses ... we talk about that in some months!
• Annoying Enemies
  • They are annoying but still important. Enemies that you want to focus and feel good to kill. But to many of them and its just frustating! So I learned to not have to many of them in the scene at the same time. They should be powerful and a threat to you. But if you play it well or at least decently, you can always kill them really fast.
  • The rule is essentially, the more enemies are alive at the same time, the less enemies can be alive that are annoying
• Counter mechanics
• Every enemy should be countered by a specific ability of the player. 
• You can also beat them with other abilities as well BUT there should be one ability enemies get beaten by the fastest. That way might be easier or harder than others but it should always be the fastest or most convenient.
• This way I can backwards engineer enemies. I can first think of an ability they should be countered by and then what they therefore should be able to do. 

•  Enemy Changes
• Ranger 
  • has his kamikaze attack removed. He now sticks to one behaviour! Run away and shoot.
  • Now that bullets can be reflected he is countered by it. So hitting his bullets or reflecting it with your shield is the fastest way to kill him.
• Guardian
  • is removed for now. To complicated and weird!
  • Might come back in the future but would be completly different
• Wolfs
•  are now more coherent. They stick to the sides more and wait for you to come close. I will add some more to this as it is weird by itself. They currently just wait for you no matter what. So if you never get close to them, they never attack you, ever.
• Best countered by the counter attack.

• New Enemy
• Rapier
• Has a long ranged weapon and uses it in a lunge attack in which he has his long weapon in front of him
• His attack has more range than yours. You need to sidestep him which is the best counter mechanic against him.
• In the future I will make his windup longer -> You can also dash into him really fast and punish / kill him when he starts his windup
• If you block his attack or get hit by it, you will be knocked back far

• New Sounds 
  • have been added. They are mainly there to test the waters. We see what works and which direction we should take.
  • Any thoughts on the sounds? Let us know! 
• The Story will be a long work in progress, in this update we did another starting story / cutscene. Let us know what you think about it!

Thats it folks!

Thank you so much for reading this to the end it really means a lot to me! I put so much time into this so you guys know what is going on. I hope you find this informative and interesting. We will do more devlogs in the future to keep you updated! If you don't like text, we also make videos and put them on Youtube

There are a lot of the things we did. Of course we did a lot more but mentioning them all ... this already has become really long. But if you want more you watch me make the game live on Twitch
There you can also ask me anything about the game. give me feedback, tipps or suggestions. Anything that is on your mind!

If you feel so inclined please play the game and share it with your friends. It means the world to us!
Have a good day! (Moon)