Hello! Since demo 2 is live we wanted to share how we went about designing the art and battle for one of our battles, the Bishamon fight! The video shows us creating and animating Bishamon by hand. We do this process after we completed the concept and white block of the fight.
BIshamon's concept was based on more martial arts. We designed him initially to be more 'in your face' against Torii and that would draw Torii into more dodging. The problem we found was that keeping at range and allowing him to attack was too troublesome so he needed more AOE style attacks as well (you could just hit him and run).
This is where we added in a strike down and confirmed we needed a strike up. Striking up was to prevent the player just staying above and continually hitting him, where as a strike down would summon either the orbs/thunder of war.
The orbs force the player to navigate the terrain while also avoiding Bishamon himself. As for the lightning....
Yes, even that is hand drawn frame by frame!
We will go into further detail with our fights but we don't want to spoil too much here! Demo 2 is available now and goes through two full gates and we would love your feedback!