So, it's been quite a while since the last devpost, but things have been done. I'm not even going to bother saying anything about release date because we all know nobody has actually shipped a complete project on time.

Non-combat sections

Got some cutscene animation (mostly) done, along with sketching out the intro section.

This is a sketch of the boss #2 walkup layout- reach the top of the hill, put on your shoes, and start walking on the sky to meet the second boss. I've used it to estimate how much detail I want to put into the environments- after all, they're not the star of the show, and you only go through each place once due to the game's linearity. I'd say the current setup is about 50% as detailed as I want it- trees should be denser, some foliage is needed, but overall, it's in the general order of magnitude that I'm aiming for in terms of detail.

It's quite subtle, but the player now sways slightly while idle (as do several other characters). I'm hesitant to call this breathing because the player character probably doesn't have lungs, but either way, it makes things look less lifeless. I'd initially considered not giving the player (and only the player) a swaying animation because of what they are and meant to represent, but it seemed too easy to mistake for laziness/lack of polish.

Trees are by Broken Vector on the unity asset store, though the final version will be tweaked for better fit with what my worldbuilding notes say about the region's flora.

Started some more NPC implementation for the Part 3 sky city from that garden model I posted ages ago. This is one of the smaller scenes as you approach the boss #5 arena- you have to walk through it to reach the fight, but it's your choice whether to interact with the despondent woman on the bench. Clothes will be much fancier in the final version, this is just a blocking out her pose/location.

Also, faces got reworked to something much lower poly and bone-based, rather than shapekey-based.

Bosses

So far, most boss fights have only been designed in abstract- there's a concept and layout of how it should go in the broad strokes, and then a whole pile of attack patterns and mechanics implemented without really being sorted into distinct phases or anything. Now that I've got the raw material to work with, it's time to really bridge that gap between macro and micro design.

I decided to have every boss focus on a mechanic- not necessarily unbeatable without utilizing it, but significantly easier if you do so. It's a nice pillar to design a boss around when I'm stuck on exactly what direction to take.

Boss #1 stuff- new lightning effects that I'm pretty happy with, plus a rough sketch of the dying animation. The second, more gruesome part, where you have the option to attack the puppet master to get the magic shoe drop faster, isn't animated yet.

The focal mechanic of this fight is the interrupts- it's meant to be a pretty easy introductory fight either way,  and incentivizes using interrupts by giving very large windows compared to other fights.

Here's boss #2. It's still pretty early-stages mechanically because I had to basically scrap and rewrite all the previous worm segment management code. It all looks the same now, but doesn't randomly break, and runs at about double the framerate.

Boss #2's focal mechanic is jumping- there are attacks are most easily avoided by jumping (you can dash through them, but it's much more difficult to time).

Here's boss #3 in progress- to simplify things, I've made the camera switching automatic based on which enemy is the main threat. Because this game has been scoped down to purely a series of duels, it no longer makes sense to have a dynamic camera system that reacts well to multiple enemies, because there aren't really multiple enemies. Really, this fight is a lot like boss #1 in that it's a puppetmaster controlling a large golem, it's just that this time they can move independently.

The big focus of boss #3 is dashing, in contrast to boss #2's making dashing very hard. The area attacks denoted by those big slices can't be parried, but they can be dashed through. The boss also has mechanics to punish the player for jumping, though the implementation of that is a bit wonky at the moment.

Boss #5 stuff.

This fight's focus is on parrying. Every time the boss swings his weapon and you don't parry, it powers up, and at max power, it spawns extra projectiles. The effects for this aren't very readable at the moment; that's definitely something I'm aware of and need to fix. Same goes for the rest of the boss, really- the mechanics have sort of outpaced the animations and effects.

He also has a projectile which has to be parried- if you sidestep it, the projectile stops and turns into a projectile turret.

The boss himself can parry your attacks (so can boss #3, actually), which allows for back and forths to be created.

Mechanical Changes

Lots of small tweaks to make the game feel more responsive.

I've scrapped sprinting to simplify controls because it never really made sense not to run (and as previously established, I don't want a stamina system for basic actions). 

Instead of stopping the player completely when taking most actions (parry, charge attack, heal), they enter a 'slow walk' state. This makes control feel a lot more responsive, even though you're not really going to be dodging much in that state.

Jumping is now instant- the delay made logical sense, but didn't feel good, especially given how the game establishes that it's playing fast and loose with physics (e.g. jumping attack animations, weapons bigger than their wielders).

I'm thinking of scrapping the energy system too, or at least dramatically simplifying it, but that'll come when the boss fights really come together out of the masses of mechanics I've got implemented. Right now, most of the micro action is there, but the overarching macro rhythm of the fights hasn't really been implemented, and that's the scale at which energy is supposed to matter.