Hi everyone,

it's been a while since the last update. Last time I talked about integrating new features that were suggested by the beta testers. There were only few open points left:

• a music track for the end-boss fight
• a tutorial / giving the player hints
• improving visual feedback when being hit by an enemy
• blocking melee attacks

Music for the boss-fight

Once again, Neil delivered a track that fits the game really well. He somehow always manages to create a track that fits to the retro graphics without sounding cheap and I am very satisfied with the overall result. However, I won't spoil you the music here (unless Neil decides to upload it to his Soundcloud profile), but instead I would like you to play the final version and experience the music yourself.

Hints for the player

Some players reported that they found it hard to discover the game's features, for example some of them did not know that they could throw a fireball, until accidentally hitting the right mouse button. To circumvent this particular problem, I decided to add a fire stone. It is a new item that can be obtained by the player. Once collected, the player gets a hint that weapons can be changed with a key press (actually, the player can toggle between the sword and the fire stone).

Those hints are displayed on different occasions in the top-left of the screen (e.g. "Press 'M' to show the map" when the player finds a map).

Implementing a tutorial seemed a bit like overkill to me, since the game uses controls and gameplay elements that are rather standard nowadays. Further, the key bindings can be looked up and changed in the options menu.

Visual combat feedback

Until the last version of the game, hit-feedback in combat situations was limited to sounds and the health bar on the bottom left of the screen. For the next version, I decided to add a red screen overlay when the player is hit. Further, the sword hand moves a little bit in order to indicate pain.

Hit feedback the other way around is a little bit trickier. Basically I see three approaches: Giving each enemy sprite a hurt animation (which is the most work-intensive option), spawning blood particles (which could become too gory very soon), and pushing the enemy back when hit.

I decided to implement the latter one, not only because it is not that costly, but also because it has the nice side-effect that enemies slide away from you when being killed, which actually looks very satisfying (if that is appropriate to say so).

Blocking attacks

Finally, many players asked for the possibility to block enemy attacks. The default key binding for this is the right mouse button. The player then holds the sword in a defensive stance. While parrying and facing an attacking enemy, attacks will be blocked. However, I'll still have to figure out how to balance this feature, since now the player could run through the game while blocking all melee attacks and without ever caring about near-range combat.

Possible corrective actions could include a randomness factor for the efficacy of the parry (so that it does not alway protect you) or a stamina bar that is decreased while blocking.

Time Schedule and feature creep

At this point in time I think that I don't want to add any more new features to the game, but instead focus on fine-tuning and balancing the existing ones.

My rough time schedule is that I want to release the final version around easter 2020, which only leaves me less than a month for all the tuning work. On the one hand, I don't have any hard milestones, but on the other hand, I have some other ideas for new projects and I want to get this one done.

This is why I'm also struggling with implementing one more idea: I thought of adding controller support to the game. I think that this would add value for players that don't like mouse and keyboard input. Adding it to the actual game would be not that hard, since my engine is build on-top of SDL2, which has joystick support built-in. However, the menu and UI controls are not ready for this. I would have to invent new navigation concepts for the menus and I am afraid that feature creep will prevent me from finishing the game.

Finally, I hope that I'll find a dude with a mac computer who is wiling to help me porting the game to the third major desktop platform for the final release (since I do not own one). Basically porting the game should only require building the source code and packaging up the necessary libraries, since the code should be platform-independent.

If you have any opinion on the controller support or on the new features and fine-tunings, I would be more than happy if you left a comment either here or on my twitter account @CarstenPfeffer.

Best regards and stay healthy, Carsten

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