Last year in review (AKA- Oh right, there's a devlog!)

I don't think the weekly update experiment really worked out. Going to be trying out something else this year, but more on that later. For now, let's see what's actually been done since the last time I posted.

So, lots of stuff done on the duo boss. As mentioned before, they're more or less the definitive stress test for general engine features.

A Stamina Ramble

I experimented a bit with a stamina system here (seemed like a no-brainer considering the obvious souls influence), but found that it didn't really work: A big part of what makes stamina feel good in souls is how it changes over the course of the game. Other stats like vitality (for health) and attack scaling stats (like strength) are in direct competition with enemies' numbers. Even though your max health goes up as you level up, so does how much enemies hit for, so it's not super noticeable unless you backtrack. 

Meanwhile, stamina directly translates to being able to do more things in a much more tangible way. Higher leveled weapons don't take more stamina to swing (barring the niche giant ones), so you can attack a noticeably greater number of times before running out.

However, Bloodless is a short game, so there's no time to really grow into this. It's also not a story about growing to overcome impossible odds. The player character is more in-line with Furi's main character, in that they start as the scariest thing around, and what follows is just inevitability. 

Overall, stamina doesn't really feel like it works, both gameplay-wise and narratively.

___

Anyway, then I added some more effects, adjusted lighting, and started messing with particles.

Lots of particles on Murmur (the laser-shooting golem in the back). These were pretty fun to play around with, and pretty accurately reflect the reference doodle of this boss:

Anyway, the most recent iteration of the fight:

I'm only enabling one member of the duo at a time to properly showcase stuff. Having them both attack at once is actually a bit of a mess at the moment, figuring out a good way to create an interesting flow here is a priority.

Sword projectiles, woo!

Note that there are still quite a few placeholder animations, like the enemy walking one is just me throwing the player walk anim at them.

Other than the obvious, some notable stuff that changed:

• More effects
  • Hit effects on the bosses.
  • Rubble generated as the beam rakes across the ground.
• Experimental hair physics.
  • I'm going to have to edit the physics settings based on what the player's doing- there's no good setting for all scenarios because this isn't a game with physics-based movement (similar deal for any other characters that may come up).
• Reworked the boss' jumping slash attack to slam into the ground
  • Being able to land on one's feet after that leap kinda makes it feel like it lacks impact- an alternative fix would be to extend the animation further to use that momentum, but either way, just landing like that is really the worst of both worlds.
• Camera fixes
  • I never really showed it before, but there was a really old bug that'd cause the camera to jitter every time you locked/unlocked targets. That's fixed.
  • Smooth target switching.
• Lamps (moths pending)
  • The most interesting thing here is more on the technical side- I'm dynamically spawning lamp objects based on markers in the blender file. It's sorta like having prefabs, except in blender.
  • Other than that, it adds to the environment.
  (and lots of backend work)

So this  year, instead of trying (and failing) to do weekly devlog posts, I'm instead just going to post whenever I make something cool I think is worth sharing, and post an overall recap once a month. Let's see how that goes.