Hello everyone!
Following through with our post announcing what are our plans for for this year:
We're starting by reworking the game's combat to make it more dynamic and satisfying, and one of the functionalities we'll be adding is the Flow System. As you attack, perform combos, parry, and maintain aggressive pressure against the enemies, Kalyskah will be accumulating Flow, which will increase her speed and damage output.
We'll also be introducing a new mechanic called Stance that will be replicated among enemies and Kalyskah herself. The more pressure you put on your enemies, particularly at higher Flow ranks, the more powerful Kalyskah's attacks will become, making her more likely to break their Stance. This Stance break results in a temporary stun, which then allows her to perform high-reward punishers and Bite finishers.
The Flow system we're working on rewards consistency and offensive gameplay, but it doesn't eliminate risk! The entire new combat system is built around commitment, with every offensive action featuring a distinct, vulnerable Recovery phase that you'll see in the animations.
Imagine Flow as Kalyskah's vampire mindset and frenzy taking over, only to be lost through mistakes, passive play, or failed high-risk actions. While higher Flow ranks (That will go from D to S as you successfully chain attacks) accelerate your attack recovery to reduce vulnerability windows, they do not bypass the commitment model, and enemies will still be able to exploit it if you fail to dodge or parry their attacks in time.
We have begun from the foundation, setting up all the debug variables (in the lower-right corner of the video) and creating tools to give us more control over what is happening and why. This means that once we start re-introducing the animations and visuals, the programming will take the lead and fully control how things will look, which will prevent all the quirks and issues our current combat has.
It will take us a few more weeks to have the visuals and AI integrated in the new combat, but don't worry, the programmer team is working on a separate branch of the project that will be merged with the one I'm currently adding the new quest.
The bunch of numbers displayed on the side is very technical, but if you go through them, it could give you some hints of the direction we're going!!
Due to this large-scale update, which is really necessary to address the general jankiness many people reported in the demo, we'll need to push the game's release to June. And the goal is to, before then, re-release the demo with the new combat once we have the first draft, collect your feedback, and then continue polishing.
We really want to bring you a good game, and to do so, we're growing our team for the final push!
Also, remember about the Lore and Q/A we mentioned we want to do eventually, so any questions about vampirism, Kalyskah's legion, the world, or general lore or story, feel free to ask, so we can bundle the answers in a single post!