Devlog #32 | Early Alpha Update

Welcome everyone, 

this update is kind of big but also all over the place so the devlog will be short.

Art

We worked over the art and we did ... I forgot. But I remember we gave the background a pattern. After that, we worked on the UI! That one is more recent so I remember it a lot.

Liz created the layout and I put it into Unity. Here is a image of how it now looks

Anyways the hype is now on the side like a volume bar. Which it kinda will be since the audience will have sound effects. The volume of them will be influenced by the hype. So it fits perfectly.

Then we got the health, which we now use hearts for. The hearts fill up from down to the top. So basically it's the same but it looks a lot better. The blue box that the hearts are inside expands each time you get more hearts. At the top right is the gold you have also in a box.

And at the right side are all the items you bought, shown as icons. And you guessed it, also in a box. This way you have all the UI around you. The most important stuff is on the top left. While the less important stuff is on the right.

When a boss or miniboss appears the bottom shows their health as a bar. Kind of like before. Left from the bar is a little icon, showing the enemy that this health belongs to. Also around the icon is a hexagon. It looks cool but also serves the porpuse to show how many phases the boss has. So the first boss's second phase starts, when his hp drops to 0. It's refilled and phase 2 starts. The inner hexagon is now faded out to indicate phase 1 being done.

Music

The most recent thing we did was to work over the music. We have been experimenting with it for quite some time now to figure out how the music can be changed dynamically to reflect the intensity of the game. Mainly the hype ressource, as it represents how hyped up the crowd is. That is really important but also very difficult. But FMOD is great and has many features we can use to do the things we want to do.

The system we created looks like this: left to right we have different music parts. We have a traveling and combat part. When you enter a bubble with enemies in it, the combat music starts. When the fight is over, the traveling music starts. We just jump between the sections back and forth. For music progression porpuse we have multiple traveling and combat sections. The further in the level you get, the more the music progresses.

During the combat the hype can change up and down. Whenever it does that, new music parts come in or out. These are vertical. So the same music for traveling, has multiple tracks. Each track has some instruments in it.

Basically imagine some song you like. Now strip away some of the instruments and the vocals. Now imagine playing a game and when you do good, more and more instruments come in. The situtation gets really tense all of a sudden the vocals kick in. It's so good when done well!

Devil may cry does this with when you get high combos. They make the song more hyped up by changing the section in the song. In our case it needs to be more dynamic as this happens all the time. So we dont change sections, instead we put tracks in and out.

It took us some time to get to the current version we got, but we are still experimenting with some stuff. It's a really difficult thing to do.

Combos

I remade stab and stab lunge. Before this update stab was a chargeable attack. Really heavy hitting. If you only press the button for a little bit, you would do a quick stab lunge. This attack moves you forward quite a bit. Now you always do stab lunge the first time you press the button. That feels better as it is more responsive.

But I didn't end there. Oh no no no no. I created something like combos with minimal effort. Normally when you press the swing button you do swing one, then swing two and then swing three. Simple and mindless spamming. After swing one or swing two, you always been able to do a stab lunge. Now that wasn't really interesting until ...

Until I decided to do something funky. Now you can do stab lunge from idle, or after swing one or swing two. Swing three is the end of a combo. The game changer is that after stab lunge you can do swing one again. Meaning you can keep the combo going. Now on paper that doesnt sound like that much BUT ITS FREAKIGN HUGE. Why? Because swing 3 has a big recovery while Stab lunge's can be skipped.

So if you do this: swing 1 -> swing 2 -> stab lunge -> swing 1 -> swing 2 -> swing 3 then you have no recovery until swing 3. The damage you deal is so much more and it feels so satisfying to combo the shit out of fat tanky enemies. It's so good.

"But but but ... what happened to Stab?", you might ask. Well well well, during a combo you can only do stab lunge once. Else you would spamm that harder than square when Kratos was punching Hercules. It would take the skills out of the combo.

So the second time you do stab lunge during a combo, it's a stab instead. Stab feels so much like a finisher ability and now I can make it really strong as it's a lot harder to pull off. Stab lunge always moves you forward so setting it up for a stab afterwards is super difficult but super satisfying. I wanna do more in the future with the combos but that's it for now.

It's really interesting how just changing the transitions a little bit made the fighting a lot more interesting, challenging and fun.

Thats all folks

Thank you all for reading! Let me know what you think about the new combos. See you guys around o/