The Project so Far

Mostly an art/background info dump, first time using itch.io.

The game is planned to be a boss rush with intermissions of environmental storytelling between fights, with gameplay approximating a cross between Furi and Dark Souls.  The story's split into three chapters. In each chapter, you have one fight against a humanoid-sized (-ish) opponent meant to provide a challenge. Story-wise, beating them is critical to reaching the second part. The second fight is against a titanic entity, more about spectacle than skill. Not that it'll be outright easy, but easier than the first. It's a sort of reward for beating the hard part.

The seventh and final boss is a mix of both.

Anything can change. This was originally meant to be a movement-focused game with procedurally generated terrain, replicating source engine airstrafing and bhopping. Then I got progressively more hung up on boss fights until I figured that I may as well just make a boss rush.

The art style is lowish-poly, with an emphasis on minimal texturing. 

Player


Spears planned to be throwable to stun enemies at opportune moments (so basically Bloodborne guns), or charged up to deal damage outright.

Head is incomplete; placeholder there to make aligning hitboxes easier.

Chapter 1 & Boss 1
The boss with the most actual gameplay implementation so far.

Your goal in chapter 1 is to hunt down a soul-stealing wyrm living in the clouds. Unfortunately, you can't fly. Enter the first boss- a demon who lives in inverted gravity, and steals people's skin to make puppets that anchor it to the ground.  You're here to beat it up and steal its shoes. That way, you can walk on the sky and find your real target for the chapter.

Basic first implementation, testing some animations and weapon collision detection code. The red lines are raycasts. Raycasts following the player are for sticking to slopes when moving at high horizontal speed.

First implementation of the puppet master on top. Just using the weapon as an IK target for testing. Not too fussed about that at the moment- had to put the puppeteer up there because he's also meant to throw projectile attacks from his right arm.

Note that the attack animations have been slowed down dramatically since these two clips were made. That'll be visible next time a post is made featuring the first boss (also featuring a less janky puppeteer and more attack behaviors).

Boss 3

Mostly concept doodles. Also featuring my first-ever attempt at digital painting. Her coat's been redesigned at least three times by now.

Other Stuff

Some enemy concepts from back when this game was meant to have more content between boss fights (i.e. when the project scope was quite optimistic). There's a lot of background lore to draw from, since this game is set in a long-running worldbuilding project of mine (currently ~350 000 words of notes on characters, cultures, technologies etc.), but the time where this game takes place is intentionally super vague as to not lock me into anything gameplay-wise.

Also, giant fire-breathing salamanders with three prehensile tongues exist in the setting. This is completely irrelevant because you never come within a thousand miles of one during the events of the game, but I wanted to share it anyway.