October Development Update - Pre-Alpha v0.01

Happy Halloween, everyone! Got some huge news for y'all today. Later today, I'll be releasing the very first ever build of Blood Crisis. It's an experimental pre-alpha build, so it's just a handful of attacks and some punching-bag enemies as of right now, but if you've ever wondered Alpha Knight feels like to control and combo with, now's your chance to find out!! I'm still aiming to have a closed demo by the end of the year that will be available to tier 2 patrons as well. 

Progress

Alright, so, over the last month I've spent a lot of time refining code in preparation to create the groundwork for the combo system. The foundation for the individual attacks is set up and nearly finished, but as of right now they're just strung together with a bunch of if-thens. This would balloon out of control with more than the 5 attacks that I have now, and is just generally the worst way to do things outside of running quick tests. I've started doing some light refactoring in order to split my action component parent into multiple sub-parents that all actions in the game will draw from. Right now, actions like jumping, opening chests, and interacting with objects all use the same parent class as attacks and combo moves, and this isn't ideal for a number of reasons so I've started updating some old code to function cleaner and more consistently in preparation for the big refactor. This will allow me to start working on integrating spells, limits, and reaction commands as well.

Combat Changes

While working on this stuff, I've changed a few things about how I plan on making the base game function. For the past few months I've tossed around a number of ideas for how the game's base parry should work, and what I've settled on is basically an extension/simplification of how Kingdom Hearts 2 does it (shocking, I'm sure). 

Originally, your "parry" was going to be a single move that could be woven into combos using the Square button. However, attacks could also parry and would result in a different outcome, and this just felt too convoluted for the kind of game I want to make. Blood Crisis should be easy to pick up but challenging to master, and I feel strongly that changing this mechanic will be better for the game in the long run.

So, rather than the square button being used for parrying, replacing block/dodge roll, I'm instead splitting the base combo between the two buttons. I have two goals with these changes:

1: Simplify parrying. 

Because any attack can parry, I can make a set of blanket rules for the game that should simplify things across the board. Normal attack parries interrupt your combo and send you into a guarded state, and finishers provide invincibility for the duration continue uninterrupted. Like KH2, normal attack parries send you into a successful "guard", but unlike KH2, Blood Crisis doesn't have a recoil state for the player, so successful parries will always be safe. 

2: Give the player more agency over the auto-combo system.

With AOE attacks on Square and single-target attacks on X, there's considerably less guesswork on the player's part with regards to which attack they're going to get in any given situation. The auto combo system does still take care of a few things, like getting the player from a ground combo to an air combo and adjusting attacks based on proximity to enemies.

The Future

I plan on having parrying as a mechanic fully implemented by early next year, and hope to release a public demo sometime in 2024, so all of my work for the next few months will be centered around that goal. I've also started working on a new area, which I'd like to have included in the end-of-the-year demo, and I'm also working on adding new attacks as I expand the combo system.

These next few months are going to be both exciting and also a lot of work. As always, I'm extremely grateful to all of my patrons for supporting this project and allowing me to spend significantly more time developing Blood Crisis than I would be able to otherwise. Tier 3 and 4 patrons can expect a post with a link to the pre-alpha build shortly.