HELLSEED - DEVLOG #1

29 Aug 2020Developer post

Source: Steam Community (opens in a new tab)

Hi guys,

Today we start to publish a series of news about HELLSEED development progress.
We are continuing to develop the remaining (big) part of the story, that will be available in the EARLY ACCESS except the last part, that will be available when the game exists the EARLY ACCESS stage.

In the meanwhile we are improving some of the gameplay mechanics of the demo.
THE NEW DEMO WILL BE AVAILABLE DURING THE FIRST HALF OF OCTOBER.

Following are some of the progresses we have done after the last demo update:

The player now runs 3x faster :D
The woman monster also runs faster (a bit faster than player) and the speed is prefectly synchronized with the running animation.
Now lowest stamina doesn't block player, in other words, if player continues to press run button after stamina has reached the lowest value, he can continue to run until he stop (leave the run button). When he stops he cannot run until stamina has completelly filled (as previously).
We have introduced some screen effect (chromatic aberration and blur) that increases when stamina level decreases and viceversa.
Almost all the keys now can be used without passing trough the inventory, simply press action button if you are close to the door to be opened. ;)
Now if the player has the spotlight ON the woman monster can see him also behind barrels, tables, other obstacles and dark areas.
We have introduced some AI dark areas in which player can hide from woman monster sight (if, of course he has the spotlight OFF)
NEW QUICKITIME EVENT
We have changed the part in which player can escape from monster attack. Previouslly it was sufficient to press a random button (showed on the lower-left corner of the screen) in any moment, to stop the monster attack, and pressing the wrong button had no conseguences. In the new version we have used a sort of QUICKTIME event: when monster start to attack the player it stops about 1 second, during this temporal window the player has to press the right button, otherwise the attack of the monster starts and cannot be stopped, the button to be pressed is random and showed at the center of the screen, together with a pregress bar that shows how much time remain before the quicktime finishes.
SHADOWS IMPROVEMENT
We have improved the shadowmapping of S2ENGINE HD by introducing a new parameter called "angleBias" to the lights. This parameter allows you to correct some artifacts that appear using only the "bias" parameter for reducing shadowmapping acne and/or "peter-pan" effect. There are couple of images showing the BEFORE and AFTER the fix. As you can see, before the improvement, in the dark areas there were some lighter pixels that break the atmosphere and realismn of the scene: