General Update #7

Apologies for not posting this update on the 1st as I said I would, I was intent on just getting a little further with what I've been working on before reporting on it.

I usually have to read back on the last month's update to remember what I have already said and it's always a little surprise to me how much has been done since then, so without further pause here's where we're at.

It's been very much largely and solely coding with only a little bit of dabbling in design work the past month. The stamina bar and how it functions is completely done so I can talk about that a little as mentioned last update on how it'll work. The progress on implementing H-scenes is... I want to say half way done, or a little over half, it turned out a fair bit more complicated than I originally anticipated, but I'll talk about that more too. For now...

Stamina bar: So, as most can probably guess the stamina bar is a recharging resource that gets spent when you swing your weapon and make attacks, but I mentioned that I'd also like it to serve as something of a 'posture' bar, or maybe even 'stability'. With this in mind if your stamina reaches zero you can keep making attacks, but the bar will not recharge until you stop attacking. It sounds a little pointless right? Well, enemy attacks also reduce your stamina upon being hit or making contact with the enemy itself. What does this mean? If your stamina is low enough or at zero due to constant attacking then the next enemy attack that lands on you will knock you down and place you into a vulnerable state. See where this is going? In this sense you can choose to attack recklessly at the expense of your own safety, or play cautiously to prevent knock downs and the vulnerable state they place you in. (There will be numerous other events however that can still place you into a vulnerable state...)

H-Scenes: And of course when you're knocked down any enemy can initiate a H-Scene with you. Now so far the coding on this has been a bit of a hurdle for me but I can tell you where it's at currently by laying out the idea. So a H-scene triggers when the player character is knocked down and an enemy moves into the player's collision box. This triggers a random scene from a select pool relevant to that enemy that will then play. So far we are up to the enemy being able to detect when the player is down and we are able to randomly generate a scene to play (in name only so far) from the relevant pool. This means that the only things left we have to do is play the actual animation. This can be done in a few ways; either I have the Player play the animation (which I'm not fond of as that would mean tying a -lot- of scene animations to one element, it'd get messy), play the animation over the specific enemy (works a lot nicer, the enemy will only contain the scenes its capable of), or have a hidden third entity that plays the scene over both the enemy and the player while hiding them. (This is... a possibility I consider, it sounds like it'd be clean, but we'll see.)

With that in mind there are a few uncertainties still ahead in regards to H-scenes. Firstly I would rather a H-scene not be a game-over or have the potential to stop your game, with this in mind they might not even reduce your health, but that might make it a little less exciting? It's something I'm still working out. I'm also not 100% decided on the mechanic to escape a H-scene or if it'll just be locked to a set time, or wherever it'd be an indefinite scene until the player gets out. The options for an escape mechanic are going to be either the standard mash-out of hitting various keys to fill a bar to break free, or a quick time event in which the correct series of buttons must be pressed to escape within a timeframe or the scene continues.

That being said, that's all I've got so far. Next update I might show off a new character design if it's done by then while I continue to focus on coding.

Also it's been a year now! It's a little strange for me to consider as it doesn't feel like I've been working that long on this project at all... Either way, as usual, thank you to those of you supporting and those of you keeping an interest and eye on this project!