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[CesarD8]

Hello! We are a video game development studio from México, and here is the first look at our project

Project Cinder is the provisional name of our first project, a videogame of the action/adventure genre with RPG elements, top down view and a fast paced combat that rewards rhythmic combinations of attacks and combines magical spells with melee combat. Our heaviest influences are Dark Souls, Ninja Gaiden, and Zelda.

The World

The game is set in a world that has been devastated by a mysterious mist that is everywhere and corrupts everything that has a prolonged exposure to it. The only way to stay safe is to be close to the eternal flame, the lifeforce of the planet that is extracted in a similar way in which we extract oil, and has the power to repel the mist, but attracts the fallen, creatures that have been transformed by the aforementioned mist.

Varanasi is the last city that remains in the known world, and it’s the only place left with it’s own flame source. This is why the Devas were created, a group of warriors whose objetive is to bring the flame to the nearby villages that don’t have a natural source of flame and depend on keeping bonfires lit.



The Game

Project Cinder combat is inspired by games like Dark Souls, Ninja Gaiden and The Witcher, but we want to emphasize that even though your character is a heavily trained and capable fighter, the world is ruthless and fights should be approached intelligently and skillfully.

Our combat is the biggest difference that we have with our inspirations in which you mostly only have to worry about 2 buttons to attack and perform a predetermined combo, in Project Cinder we want to make the players think a bit more when making combos and not just mash buttons but also want them to have a bit more freedom when attacking and not just set a specific sequence of attacks, so in order to make a fast and effective combo, they have to pay attention to the animation of the attacks so they can think about the inertia and select the best posible follow up.  

The magic system that we are planning to implement in the game is also very different from most games. Since magic is a very powerful thing in this world, the character has to enter a cast stance in which the player has to “draw” the symbol of the spell that is going to be used. So it’s a high risk, high reward kinda thing that may not be fit for every situation, we are still figuring out if this can work out or not given the pace of the game, but will we will try to keep you posted.

In short, while this will be a fast paced game, it also requires you to think about what to do and not just mash buttons in the fastest way you can. This way you can feel a little of the ruthlessness of this world.

Here are a couple of gifs showing the mood of the game. I hope you like it.  





Any feedback or opinion is really welcome, that's the main goal of this devlog, so feel free to comment what you think of the project.  

Links:

Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/flatcirclestudio/?ref=aymt_homepage_panel

Tumblr: http://flatcirclestudios.tumblr.com/

and my Twitter: https://twitter.com/Cesar_D8

[high-priest.clppr]

Looks great! A friend and I are working on something that we want to look similar in art-style

Following

[Pixel Noise]

Wow, the concept art is VERY cool, and the in-game footage already looks pretty nice! Definitely following. How long have you been working on it already?

[Sustrato]

This looks very cool. I dig the visuals you've got going on and the setting you've built. That short description sounded just pulpy enough for an ARPG, while also motivating and mechanically thematic.

Is there going to be multiplayer?

[CesarD8]

Wow, the concept art is VERY cool, and the in-game footage already looks pretty nice! Definitely following. How long have you been working on it already?

The project is somewhat old, like 2 years or so, but we only had concepts, the gdd and a shitty main character model. We started working seriously on it 5 or 6 months ago, and the things that I posted are the result of that time

Is there going to be multiplayer?

We are focusing on the single player right now, but it's still very early to tell, so who knows?

[Davi Vasc]

Like everyone else said, the art looks really cool, nice work 

I think its kind of funny that the character hits an enemy a couple of times then starts running like crazy to avoid being hit. Do you plan on implementing some sort of roll/dodge/block mechanic? I think it would fit the game well specially considering the games you are taking as reference.

[CesarD8]

Like everyone else said, the art looks really cool, nice work 

I think its kind of funny that the character hits an enemy a couple of times then starts running like crazy to avoid being hit. Do you plan on implementing some sort of roll/dodge/block mechanic? I think it would fit the game well specially considering the games you are taking as reference.

It does have a roll/dash mechanic, but when I saw your post I realized that its not working It also has a dodge mechanic to counter attack without having to get out of combat but I will show that in a future post. For now I will se what's wrong with the dash, thanks for noticing 

[CesarD8]

Hey guys, in the last post I wanted to make put some gifs showing some of the enemies and one of our main characters but I felt like it was going to extend the post to much, so I'm going to do that now

This guy here is called Zubathu, is one of the devas that have to bring the flame to the places that need it. The devas are some kind of group of monk warriors heavily trained in melee combat and magic.


This is one of the fallen, those are the guys that went mad with the mist that covers the world. This one was a civilian so they are more common and less dangerous.


This is a fallen soldier, as the name implies, before going mad it was a soldier, so it still has some of it's armor and weaponry, and because of it's training and equipment, these guys are more dangerous than the common fallen.


The world still has some fauna in it, and while the mist didn't make all the beasts crazy, it did make them a lot more aggresive, this beast here is temporally called "camahueto" (we still don't name him), and it's kind of a goat/dog of sorts. It explodes when near death and multiplies


Another one of the beasts in the world are the Guni, these are an annoying species of worm that spit at you when you are at a certain range and escape when too close.


I'll end this for now, tell me what you think. Hope to hear from you guys  

[SimonFelix]

This looks fantastic so far, great job! I really like the cell-shaded look, reminds me of the Torchlight games in a way.

[CesarD8]

Sooooo it's been a long time since I updated this, and I barely explained what it was. Turns out having a full time job, several hobbies, making a game and trying to keep people updated on said game it's pretty much impossible. Who would've thought?

Anyway, the lack of updates doesn't necesarily means lack of progress, and while we have been working waaay slower than what we would have liked, we do have a lot of new stuff and recently all of us working in the game have a lot more free time than before so other developers in the project are going to be posting the updates on their areas and hopefully that will translate on keeping the devlog updated.

We added several new attack animations, scenarios, effects, interactions and a couple of weapons. I'm having a very hard time explaining all the new stuff that could've been shown gradually, so here are a couple of gifs showing 2 weapons, and also a bit of 2 new scenarios:

The greatsword


and the staff


Since the project was started a long time ago, when we were waaay less experienced, we decided to rework a lot of stuff, not from scratch, since that would be a big set back and it's really not necessary, but we are optimizing and reorganizing the project. Right now my main focus has been the movement and the animation system. Before, I used multiple layers to change the type of action (attacks, idle, movement, hits, death) where there were multiple animations in that category, and now I'm compressing all that into one, more organized, layer. While the objective is to make everything look the same but easier to code and manage, the movement system was changed from a more binary moving/not moving animation and speed to a gradual acceleration one, we feel it looks more natural and the code is cleaner.

These are some not as glamorous gifs showing the difference, the top one is before and the lower one is after.



Let us know what you think  

[CesarD8]

A gif of some animations and a spell that we worked on. It's in the testing environment so it's not that pretty, I probably should start using a nicer scene to show these things. Also I'm looking for a site where I can upload bigger gifs, I'll update them when I know where.

[CesarD8]

Tt's been a couple of long weeks and unfortunately I bought Frostpunk which kept me from working. In my defense, I never imagined that I would get so addicted to that shit. It's a great game, you should play it.

Anyway, I finally finished changing the animation system for the player character, made several tweaks to the timing of the attacks. I also tested that the changing between weapons mechanic was working properly and that the weapons were playable in realtime and not only in a controlled environment, and I succeded! Here are some gifs of the different weapons animation sets working with the new animation system.







There are still several changes that need to be made, but for now, it works properly and everything is easier to understand in the code and also in the animation controllers, so if you ask me, I say that this was a complete success.

I also changed the way the dash thingy worked. Before, you couldn't dash in the middle of an attack, so it wasn't useful for getting out of dangerous situations in the middle of melee combat. We have planned a dodge mechanic that lets the character avoid damage while staying in the same place so the combat is faster and less intermitent, that's why the dash was used for avoiding damage outside melee combat but at least for now that's changed, when we implement the new dodge mechanic maybe we revert or adjust there changes.

This is how it was before, I pressed the dash button several times while the combo was going but it didn't matter until the attacks were done. Didn't even manage to turn around. Clunky AF.


And this is now, the character dashes as soon as the button is pressed in the direction wanted. Responsive AF.


Now that I have finished these changes to the main character, I'm shifting my focus on the enemies, they are too dumb and sometimes they don't care about the things I want them to do. The first victim is going to be this guy.



I'll keep you posted. 

[CesarD8]

It's been some time since the last post and I don't want to stay for too long without an update. For the past couple of weeks I have been working on optimizing the code, eliminating unnecesary scripts and changing the animation system on the enemies, I already had done that with the player code and animation, but there are still several things that I have to change with the enemies. We also had to work on preparing a demo with the stuff that we already had so visually speaking I don't have a lot of new stuff to show. The demo isn't as good as I would like, there were some corners that had to be cut in order to make the deadline, so we will not publish it now, but we are getting very close, I think maybe 2 or 3 more weeks until our own feedback is done and then we will feel confident to receive feedback from others.

But look, here is a gif of the big bad guy of the demo kicking my ass.

[Daywalker]

lookin' gewd

[SubCiro]

Hey guys, how is it going?
well this time i'm going to post an update, like  CesarD8, i've been working on this project as well, trying to build a playable demo, even that, trying to refactor while adding some features seems a quite dificult task, we are still tweaking this project, for now, i'll show diferent actions about the level like camera animations and shader improvements. 


In this preview we wanted to the rune be placed no matter where  it is, when the player enter on the event trigger.


Sometimes the environment may hinder game visibility, so we are working on some ways to avoid that issue.

Hope you like it, Cya. 

[NotionGames]

looking really good