Hello, last month was productive. I finally managed to settle on the fight system, which is something I think I can build upon nicely during early access and will also be good enough for release after some minor tweaks.
I apologize for not being able to release the playtest last month. I feel I spent far too much time on mundane stuff that particularly no one's going to notice, like the I added with random flickering to searchlights. If you keep looking at it for a few seconds, you will notice it.
I talked about nighttime rendering last time, and one big problem I mentioned was with shadows and moon position. While I'm not aiming to do an accurate day and night cycle, I did spend some time fixing issues with the rotation of the moon so we can get nice shadows at night.
Another point I touched upon last time was color grading for different weather presets. I'm adding some GIFs here, but due to size constraints, they are compressed. Somewhat better quality GIFs are available on Discord if you want to check them out. I'm also adding culling for lights at night, so overall, we will get better performance.
The fight system, which I think is ready, has one design problem. When the player keeps hitting the AI, the AI's chances of dodging or blocking the next attack increase, which creates a loop where the player definitely gets hit after a few successful hits. To solve that, I added feint attacks, so now the player and even the AI can feint an attack, which will force their opponent to react (either dodge or block) and give you an opportunity to attack. Another functionality I'm trying to add is sidestep, which is not completely ready yet but looks like this.
I also experimented with the camera. I want fights to be intense and brutal, so camera movement is important. I'm looking into different games, and keeping the camera over the shoulder seems to give such an impact, but I'm thinking of giving the player an option to disable camera animation in the settings.
What I'm thinking is keeping all these things for now and removing them after feedback during the beta and demo. Sorry for the delay, but I'm sure it'll be worth it.