Weekly report May 2/4, 2025

Hello everyone!
 Thank you as always for your support.
Let's take a look at this week's progress!

Demo Update

download it from here. The new password is "QN53tRAKYPSsuUu".

Rock-Paper-Scissors Battle

I wasn’t able to make any progress on tuning the main battle system, and due to complications from revising the flow handling, the battle state transitions ended up completely breaking.
It was in such a disastrous state that I honestly didn’t want to share it, but I also didn’t want to go three weeks in a row without any updates.
As a temporary measure, I’ve added a Rock-Paper-Scissors battle in place of the standard battle system.
Please forgive me for this workaround!
Note that the Practice mode remains playable as usual since it doesn't involve any state transitions.

Story Mode

You can now switch between Japanese and English from the main menu.
Originally, I had planned to work on refining the CPU behavior, but this week’s progress centered around the Rock-Paper-Scissors battle instead.
Zdrada and Modeus each have their own story paths.
Please keep in mind that these are purely for testing purposes and the content is very rough and hastily put together!

Flow Control

I didn’t expect to struggle this much.
The root cause was my insufficient understanding of architecture, and I realized that even the onion architecture I thought I grasped last week had been misunderstood.
It seems the most reliable structure is composed of four main layers:

• Domain: The core game logic. Should ideally be written in pure C# and completely decoupled from MonoBehaviour.

• Application: The intermediary between presentation and domain. Receives input data from presentation and uses it to drive domain logic.

• Presentation: Handles UI, audio, and other elements that present the current game state to the player, and also receives player input.

• Core (Infrastructure): Common data definitions referenced by all the above layers.

Refactoring everything to follow this model would be ideal, but the codebase is now so tightly coupled that I concluded a complete overhaul is practically impossible.
Rather than being overly fixated on this, I’ve decided to move forward with the next set of tasks.

To make flow control easier, I separated the victory screen and continue screen—which were previously part of the battle scene—into independent scenes.
Though it’s a minor detail, I struggled quite a bit with handling input to skip to the next sequence.
Additionally, I reorganized the conditions for ending a battle, which turned out to be more complicated than expected due to cases like exiting back to the main menu.
By fully delegating the branching logic to a dedicated class, the overall structure became much cleaner.

Being more conscious of proper flow helped guide my coding, which had previously been rather aimless.
The Rock-Paper-Scissors battle I put together in a hurry this week was actually a great small-scale exercise in building the input, UI, and core logic flow.
I plan to apply the insights gained from this to next week’s development.

5th Anniversary

Happy 5th Anniversary to Helltaker!
While the Story Mode itself was relatively easy to build, I spent too much time learning architecture and improving flow transitions, and unfortunately couldn’t finish it in time.
I hope to wrap it all up by the end of this month.

Next Week’s Plans

• Bug fixes in the battle system

That's all for this week. Thanks to everyone's support, we can continue development! Much appreciation.
Have a great weekend!