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[agersant]

Lovely animations! Keep up the good work!

[johnguydude]

Those are seriously cool. Fluidly animated and with excellent motion. The backgrounds are nicely colored and everything really conveys a strong art style. Cheers!

Thanks! I keep the style consistent by making sure everything qualifies as "beautiful, melancholy, and strange" which is the tone I'm going for.

This looks great! Looking forward to playing this. Good luck with it! :-D

Thank you!

very nice art & animations

Lovely animations! Keep up the good work!

Thanks! I'm entering a phase in development where I'll be making new art and animations each week, so check back regularly for more.

Ok, so I've decided I want to target PC/gamepad as well as mobile.

Initially I felt that PC users would reject the game if it didn't feature a strong navigation system like the souls games that inspired it. Unbroken has incredibly deep combat, but the world is structured into a linear series of encounters, like in Metal Slug. However, I've noticed that the scope of the game is on par with some excellent steam titles like one-finger-death-punch, so I think it will be a matter of managing expectations.

For art this week, I updated some player animations. Here's the previous run animation:

I decided to try and punch up the intensity, because I felt the existing animation looked dopey and non-chalant.
Here's what I ended up with:

This one definitely says "about to kick some ass", but it seemed too overtly heroic for the character.
I decided to keep the intensity but hide the arms again, and here's what I got:

I think I'll stick with this one.

Next, I worked on adding 3 basic attacks. I made a gif to sort of illustrate my process:

First I make a skeletal animation with clearly delineated arms and legs, then I color in the body, add the sword, and then I draw the cloak on a separate layer.

After a few days and a TON of tweaking, I ended up with this:


And lastly, here's what it all looks like together in-game:

More next week!

[blekdar]

The new animations look great! Well, mostly.

I am unsure of that run cycle. It looks kind of awkward, specifically the arc of motion. It kind of looks like he's bending in a sort of side-ways L shape, and that he should topple over while running. I think if you just raised his torso a bit it'd look better. Personally I really like the one with his sword, better line of motion and the weighting looks plausible.

The attack animation looks great though, good motion and sense of weight. You have a winner with that one.

[johnguydude]

I am unsure of that run cycle. It looks kind of awkward, specifically the arc of motion. It kind of looks like he's bending in a sort of side-ways L shape, and that he should topple over while running. I think if you just raised his torso a bit it'd look better. Personally I really like the one with his sword, better line of motion and the weighting looks plausible.

The attack animation looks great though, good motion and sense of weight. You have a winner with that one.

Thanks for the feedback! I get what you're saying about the run animation, but regardless of awkwardness I think I'm going to stick with it. When playing and watching footage, I no longer get distracted by the run animation, which was my main issue with it before.

Bunch of stuff this week. First I added the player's 'Launch' ability. In addition to launching enemies for juggling, this functions as the player's jump and can also be used to dodge low attacks:
 


I've also added the player's greatest defensive ability: weapon parry. If the player attacks at precisely the right moment, he can parry an incoming attack and temporarily stun the attacker:



Other than that, mostly I've been working on tweaking the blood and dust effects. I think they still need a lot of work, but this shows where I'm at so far with the blood:


Anyways that's it for this week! Next week I'll probably have more of the player's basic moves to show.

[xix]

Looks great! (Your twitter needs fix'n)

[johnguydude]

Looks great! (Your twitter needs fix'n)

Oops! forgot to update the link. thanks for letting me know!

[johnguydude]

This week, I added in the player's basic air attacks. Here are some WIP animation gifs:
   
And here's the final thing:


I also added a mid-air slam attack. Here is the animation by itself:

I'm experimenting with new kinds of special effects animations. Here's my first draft of the slam effect:

And here's the final thing:


More cool stuff next week!

[johnguydude]

This week I added the following:

Enemy Defense:

• Enemies can now carry shields, and they will defend themselves intelligently
• When the shield's health is depleted it will stagger the enemy
• Shields can be set to break when their health reaches 0

Player Attack Stuff:

• If the player attacks while dashing backwards, it triggers a lunging forward stab
• backdash can be used to cancel out of attacks

Here's the shield stuff in action:


Aaand the backdash cancel followed by a forward stab (FX are still wip):

[zombieonion]

This looks really great!
How are you doing the control scheme for mobile? My experience with mobile action games is that most of the time the touchscreen won't allow for precise controls, and everything suffers from that. But I think it might be me using bad touchscreens most ly.

Would you make a PC/mac/linux version?

[The Great Emoticon]

This is looking really cool. Very interesting colour palette, and your animations are looking incredible so far.

Excited to hear more!

[Pixel Noise]

I love this so far! Anything inspired by Souls has me hooked...but really, this is a great idea.

[johnguydude]

This looks really great!
How are you doing the control scheme for mobile? My experience with mobile action games is that most of the time the touchscreen won't allow for precise controls, and everything suffers from that. But I think it might be me using bad touchscreens most ly.

Would you make a PC/mac/linux version?

I've found that swipe inputs and virtual buttons are not conducive to fast-paced action where every frame matters, so I designed the combat accordingly. The left half of the screen acts like a button and the right half acts like another button, and all of the combat is done by tapping the screen with your left and right thumbs (kind of like super hexagon).

Yes, there will be a PC version, but I have no experience porting to Mac or Linux so no guarantees there. The PC version will have a completely different control scheme and UI as well as expanded game options, because I hate lazy mobile-to-PC ports.

This is looking really cool. Very interesting colour palette, and your animations are looking incredible so far.

Excited to hear more!

Thanks! I'll be posting updates every week so stay tuned!

I love this so far! Anything inspired by Souls has me hooked...but really, this is a great idea.

I'm glad you think so!

[blekdar]

The left half of the screen acts like a button and the right half acts like another button, and all of the combat is done by tapping the screen with your left and right thumbs (kind of like super hexagon).

Huh, I see what you're getting at it terms of precision but...I would need to see this in action or play it to grasp what you have in mind.

On that note if you need any testers lemme know, I got a device on most platforms (iOS, android + windows phone) so I could give you feedback using those.

[johnguydude]

if you need any testers lemme know, I got a device on most platforms (iOS, android + windows phone) so I could give you feedback using those.

Cool! I'll keep that in mind, it would be nice to get a second set of hands on the device build before I put out a demo.

Ok so this week I added the game's first ranged enemy: the bomber!


He tries to stay back and throw incendiary flasks at the player during combat:


Skillful (or lucky) players can hit them back:


The bomber naturally synergizes with the shield guy from last week:


Come back for more cool stuff next Saturday!

[My Loathsome Cowboy]

Awesome animations man!  The effects look slick and satisfying as hell.

The only suggestion I've got is to pull back the contrast on the trees layer of the background, since I feel it's competing with the foreground for attention and making the Returner's wicked antlers harder to read.

Here's a gross-looking gif, but I hope it gets the point across.

[blekdar]

I agree with Mr Cowboy, a slight de-saturate of the trees there would help a lot with the returner (I still wanna call him the Bantler).

Something I've noticed. While the world seems very souls inspired (which is awesome), the combat reminds me more of a cross of Devil May Cry and Viewtiful Joe (which is also awesome).

[johnguydude]

The only suggestion I've got is to pull back the contrast on the trees layer of the background, since I feel it's competing with the foreground for attention and making the Returner's wicked antlers harder to read.

Here's a gross-looking gif, but I hope it gets the point across.

Man, you are so right! I'll definitely address that. Thanks for taking the time to illustrate it too, corrections like that are the best kind of feedback 

Something I've noticed. While the world seems very souls inspired (which is awesome), the combat reminds me more of a cross of Devil May Cry and Viewtiful Joe (which is also awesome).

Yeah, definitely! Mechanically, the resource management and RPG elements are callbacks to Souls games, but a lot of other elements draw from Hideki Kamiya games.

[ayamflow]

Love where this is going. Has some kind of a Berserk vibe.

[mzn528]

This looks really awesome, if you are to start a kickstarter right now I'll back it in a heartbeat.


You can improve the color palette a little bit though, it looks nice right now but I bet you will get tired of it once we spend 20 hours playing it 

[johnguydude]

Love where this is going. Has some kind of a Berserk vibe.

Yeaaaaah! Glad that came across

This looks really awesome, if you are to start a kickstarter right now I'll back it in a heartbeat.

You can improve the color palette a little bit though, it looks nice right now but I bet you will get tired of it once we spend 20 hours playing it 

Thanks! That's awesome to hear. As for the palette, it will change dramatically as the game progresses. I agree that it needs another pass, though. Soon!

Ok this week I've been putting a device build together to submit to a local indie festival, so I added stamina/health resource pools, a basic HUD, and death!

Player dying:


Enemies dying:


Enemies burning alive, then dying!:


whee! More cool stuff next week! (mostly game balance stuff but still cool)