A July release still seems possible, but really, it'll be done when it's done. Honestly, I might be better off taking longer to finish it so I don't have to compete with (i.e. get drowned by) Elden Ring. 

Will be posting a playable demo next week, along with starting to seriously look at hiring a composer.

Sixth Boss

Early prototype of its mechanics. The boss' two main themes are 'building things' and 'running away from you'. It can spawn projectile totems, and throw chunks of the environment at you. The fight's phases are delineated by it running away from you after taking sufficient damage, and I'm picturing it just smashing through walls to reach the next chamber every time, like a reverse blueberry kool aid man.

Still pretty early in the prototype for this fight. It's not meant to be a particularly challenging experience, more of an extended scene transition to the final boss, who is scripted to steal your kill before you can even finish the poor thing off.

Fifth Boss

Just some touchup stuff. Haven't really gotten to the 'meat' of the fight yet, just surrounding details so far.

This is the guy who drains his court to fuel his attacks.

Fourth Boss

A very rough mechanics test of the first phase. You're meant to just attack its prehensile tentacle (tongue? body? appendage? the boss is a mass of parasitic worms, what exactly is the terminology here?). However, while testing, I realized that adding hitboxes to the thing meant you could actually run up it, so I'm keeping that with plans to add a 'critical attack' prompt. It won't be enough to bypass the entire phase, but it'll take a good chunk of health and be a neat trick to reward creative thinking.

So basically, you're fighting a nematode infesting the corpse of a giant termite queen. Phase two is where the parasite breaks out of its host's corpse entirely, and fights you with much more mobility. The mechanical specifics of that are still in planning.

First Boss

So, a lot of work here. Lots of visual effects work. For comparison, here's the last time I showed this place:

Of course, still lots of placeholders (all the buildings are just blocks, for one).

The trails of blue in the sky are traveling in the direction of the second boss, the giant worm in the sky dwelling within a swirling storm of (blue) souls.

Player Changes

Lots of changes to how the player works. These include:

• Hair physics now dynamically switches based on player state. Because the player's movement doesn't follow physics, the purely physics-based hair didn't really work the way you'd want it to.

  
  

  • So instead, there's some stuff to decide how flowy it gets based on what the player's doing- it becomes more flowy to stream behind the player when they're running, but stiffens up while walking to avoid an awkward state of 'trailing behind, but just enough to look weird'.
• Jumping reworked
  • New animations
  • Better height control- the old 'hold jump to affect fall speed' trick allows players to jump higher by holding jump for longer
  • Slight windup delay- not sure if I entirely like this yet, will see in testing
  • Momentum carries over based on run speed pre-jump, and slides the player forward a bit after landing
• Mild screen shake effects on hitting/blocking attacks

• Melee attacks rework
  • Melee attacks can now be charged by holding down attack, and swing on release
    • Charged attacks (and dash attacks) currently fire a projectile
  • Switched to slashing animations instead of thrusts. They're honestly just easier to work with:
    • Wider damage area: more forgiving for player- I could see ways around this, but then I'd be making a different game entirely
    • Easier to add effects: trail effects are easy and look good; there's no simple equivalent for thrusting effects. Adding a simple trail actually highlights how imperfect the thrusting motion is, making it seem even less clean.
    • More visible motion: similar to the above, but also in terms of the animation itself: in a thrusting attack, motion is much more aligned with the camera's view, so it doesn't seem as dynamic (again, ways around this change the sort of game I'm making, so it's simpler to just change the animation