[Release] Version 0.9 preview 2 (Test branch)

Hello everyone!

As I said on this post, the next demo will be released for the patrons on Wednesday. Most of what we needed to do 

New combat system:

Hold RMB (Right Mouse Button) to enter guard mode. While Kalyskah is in guardmode, she will face the cursor direction. Yes, if you are playing on PC this is enough for you to fight, you are no longer obliged to lock on a target to fight =)

Time your Block (RMB) properly and you might be able to parry (stag) enemies

Perform light attacks with LMB (Left Mouse Button)

Hold Shift + LMB to perform heavy attacks. The animations are different, try to mix light with heavy attacks to get different combos.

If Kalyskah is fast enough when you attack, she will thrust. This is very handy especially with the Estoc (Fencing Weapon) since you can evade and then thrust.

Hold Ctrl to enter mist form and become invulnerable. This will drain your stamina and blood points really fast, but you can attack normally while in this form.

Four combat styles, more will come in the future:

Longsword: Fast attacks that only stags the enemies if you chain them.

Zweihander: A little bit slower, but good to fight groups of enemies

Fencing: The Light Attacks does not stag the enemies, but they are really fast. The fencing weapon relies on parrying and causing damage to staged enemies, or evading backwards and then attacking.

Claws: Punch enemies to death, I know you want to! The meele attacks will usually push Kalyskah forward, so they are handy if you want to fight in a way that you keep your distance and use your attacks to approach your targets while they recover from their attack animations. 

Notice that this combat is still experimental and many tweaks will come in time to make it balanced. Right now, attacking doesn’t consume stamina, but blocking and evading does. This has two reasons: The lore side is that we want to make Kalyskah feel more aggressive while fighting, in a way that chaining attacks and finishing a battle quickly will be her personal touch on the gameplay. And on the gameplay side, we want to try the complete opposite of what we had before, combat that will feel faster (without turning into a hack’n slash) and by doing so, we can find a middle ground or just learn exactly what and why something didn’t work.

More weapons, ranged combat and magic will come in the future after we have at least one hour of gameplay on the open world.

General fixes and enhancements:

• Fixing openworld save after dungeon boss fight and made dungeon boss cutscene skippable
• New hairstyles, as I said before 
• Sword now gets unequipped when Kalyskah bites an enemy
• Fixed the "something happened to this text" error while sucking enemy blood
• Fixed second chance dialogue not being triggered
• Made negotiation with enemies a little bit easier
• Increased Gremnoch’s health and added some effects when he roars. We will improve his combat behaviour eventually too
• Foliage and lighting improvements on the open world
• disabled the tutorial until we remake it for the new combat system
• Fixed witchat mesh clipping with some hairstyles (Bun and pinned hair still clip though)
• Changed the shape of the male character's head to match the female, so female hairstyles can be compatible with male characters as well
• Added handjob animations. The interaction animation for this pose is done, just not available on this patch yet
• Citizens will no longer have the golden logo on their plate mails. Those are for another faction of the game
• Fara now sells some parts of the plate mail
• Talking about Fara, her blacksmith bench will finally be displayed as intended!

Known issue:

• The screen will get really bright during cutscenes on the open world. We only saw this bug when we were already testing the demo, and since the highlight of this TEST patch is the combat, we didn't bother about it yet. But we will look into and fix it until Wednesday. 

Royal Bloods: To get the game you should follow these steps:

If you are using Itch desktop app and already have access to the last Royal Blood patch, just click to update it. If you don't:

• Create an account on https://itch.io/
• Link your account to Patreon here 
• Download the game here

*ps: Nevermind the lack of edit on the video, it was 11am and I haven't slept when I recorded it