General Update #6

Hello again. I usually do these updates in the general start of the month but I'm going to try and make them on the 1st of each though with my terrible habit of being a little inconsistent with set dates that might change, we'll see.

As you can see the current map is getting rather large. This is the Entrance Hall and the Servant Quarters (they are virtually the same zone), though the latter might get more rooms added depending on how long or short it feels. There's still some decoration and lighting I'd like to apply within the upper part of the Servant Quarters but that shouldn't take too much time when I decide to focus on it.

On the very far bottom left is where the player will start; and as is typical for Castlevania games (especially the first few rooms) you'll encounter long hallways filled with zombies, or in this case zombie girls. To the far right we have some important rooms. The first being the central hub with the statue. This is the area that will serve as a crossroads to various other parts of the castle. To the right of the hub are (starting at the top) the teleportation room which can be used to quickly traverse the castle to specific zones. Below that is the save room (currently unlit) which is actually a bathing tub where the player character can relax (and save the game). Further below those two rooms are what I'm calling transitional rooms. The one that leads down will head into the dungeon/tomb and the one moving further right will lead to the courtyard/gardens. My intent is to grant the player the choice between two entirely different zones as soon as they've cleared the Servant Quarter.

There's a few things I wanted to talk about in this update, and without wanting this post to get too long I'll keep them quite short. (Or as short as I can.)

Firstly: the Servant Quarter. It'll contain a variety of maid enemies using various weapons and tools to attack the player. All their outfits will be lewd maid uniforms and they'll mostly be humans, if not entirely. The first zone is going to be rather normal with the more monster-girl type enemies being in later zones. There is a boss room already for the Servant Quarter that'll have the Head Maid in it, she will use many knives and be rather agile and quick. The room is relatively small so it'll be a close-encounter dependent on avoiding a type of 'bullet hell'.

In regards to coding: several more things have been done since the last update. All the camera boundaries are for the time being fixed, we now have shadows too to prevent the chandeliers from spilling light into other rooms. The health bar is complete along with a clean new UI element to hold it. Along with this is a recharging stamina bar. I will further explain the purpose of the stamina bar in a later update but to put it simply for now: it is more of a 'posture' bar than a stamina bar. I said I'd just have the health bar for the first demo but I decided that the stamina bar will play a large part in activating H scenes without a game-over, so that you can view them more often without losing progress.

This month has had a lot of progress in general and I am relatively happy with how its going, along with being more motivated than usual. I am currently working on adding more fluidity to attacks and perhaps trying to figure out how to get momentum working again. Along with this I must implement further features to the stamina bar to enable H-scenes.

Thank you to the few of you sticking around, it means a lot, and I hope I can get some real content to you soon.