Kalyskah version 0.8.10 public release! (First with the open world)

Hello everyone!

We cannot put in words how happy and excited we are about this patch, even though it doesn’t have many quests yet. This is the first step of a huge breakthrough that will mark the beginning of a new era on the development of Kalyskah: Make the game look less like a “dungeon crawler” and more like the RPG we want. With this patch, our future ones will now be able to add more minutes or maybe even hours of gameplay to the game, instead of tweaks in the mechanic. Since now we can assume the responsibility to always add a new dialogue or a new questline at each version number. And who knows when we will be able to start to work on the faction system of the game!?

I'll try to sum up the changelogs because we've done so much in the past 3 months since the last public release, that I think the game should feel much different than before. So if you have played version 0.7 you should definably give another try to the game now =)

Highlights:

• Initial open-world release. We are blocking the available area to explore because the rest of the terrain is not done yet…. So, it wouldn’t make for sense if you went to the desert if you wouldn’t find anything but sand there =)
• We separated the armours into 5 slots
• Started to play around with a parrying system, but we had to change focus while doing it so for now… Press the right mouse button when you see an incoming attack and the enemy will be staged for 3 seconds. Visual and audio effects will be added in time.
• Combat is now more responsive, where characters take a step back if an attack is blocked.
• Weapon Scaling system added
• Manual saving game via slots instead of only checkpoints
• Started to sketch the tendency system
• Improved lipsync
• Started to add mechanics to the way erotic scenes play

Fixes:

• Equipment that reduces attributes will now be displayed properly
• Fixed typo on toysystem animation menu
• Fixed Partner weird rotations when they want to go back to their patrol position during an erotic scene
• Environmental fixes
• The sound that plays when you open a door is now 3d.
• Decreased the volume of footsteps sounds and made the sound options menu work for the dialogue lines too
• Fixed HUD intermittently showing up
• Save/load game will track the character gold coins amount (We don't have a manual saving system yet, so you need to get the checkpoint at the entrance of the village to save your progress)
• Fixed Kalyskah and female NPCs breasts being pushed up depending on the armour they were wearing when a sex scene started
• Slight code optimisation when the player changes equipment
• The amount of gold that you get from a chest will now be displayed properly when you hover your mouse on it
• Fixed a problem that could cause Kalyskah to be teleported to the wrong part of the map in case she died after loading a game, but before passing through a new checkpoint
• Fixed a problem that was making saving more than 1000 experience points being loaded without 3 decimal places;
• Fixed sucking blood from dead enemies;
• Added a chest with the Karnstein legion armour back to the dungeon;
• Removed Stairwell key

Enhancement:

• Gameplay: Mist and Dash are now on different keys so it is always available during combat
• Balancing: Slightly reduced the amount of undead at the dungeon
• Balancing: Humanoid enemies are a bit smarter now and will change their guard to the direction of your hit to avoid getting hit twice on the same direction.
• Balancing: Because of the change we did above, you can now change your guard direction at the last half of your attack animation so you can chain combos through different directions a bit easier, or block one incoming attack. This should make the combat feel a bit slower since you might get staged and punished if you spam attacks.
• NPCs can now open doors… Yeah, don’t shut the door at the undead while he follows you or you will get in trouble!
• Improved collision on every one-handed sword
• Added a fade in\out effect to avoid the player seeing Kalyskah while she loads her equipment and is spawned on the checkpoint
• Camera no longer pan around the level while the game loads
• HUD: Made the text on Health, Experience and Rigor Mortis (Stamina), white and added a black outline. So now you will be able to see the text-independent on how bright the background is
• HUD: Added tooltips on the attributes if you hover them with your mouse
• Improvements on Merishya's tail
• Merishya will now move her tail to the sides when she idle.
• Merishya's tail should no longer flicker.
• Merishya's tail now blends physics with animation, that means that the movement when she walks is now way smoother.
• Improved game logo
• The same key that opens the inventory now opens the equipment as well
• We are slowly changing the logic of our ‘toy-system’, and the characters should now be aligned properly during the sex scenes because there is a new function on the backend to make sure that they will snap to each other.
• Changed the way Kalyskah undresses herself during the sex scenes: Now the clothes will go to her inventory instead of just being hidden during the animation. This is the beginning of a new feature that we are planning to add, where the player will manually undress Kalyskah when the scene starts in order to have access to certain poses.
• Hair shouldn’t shine as much as it was before and should be slightly more optimized
• Kalyskah's eyes now glow a little bit more when they turn red due to the lack of blood
• Improved transitions on the ‘toysystem’ (sex animations) in a way that they start with Kaly holding hands and then you can move on to the others (the missionary don’t have a transition yet)
• Improvements in the boss area
• Added some water flowing sounds to the places that you can find water at the dungeon, so this might help on the immersion
• Ending the sex animation will go to the blowjob climax placeholder animation (the subtitles are wrong, but we will fix this eventually)
• Many improvements on the back-end code and how actors generate their appearance
• Undead will now have random skin-colours, the female will generate random cloth pieces(giving them more variation)
• Improved loot from NPCs
• Tweaks on the effects when Kalyskah jumps
• Moved many lootable objects to another place. The ‘secret box’ with Merishya’s armour will now have the ‘skimpy version’. Merishya’s modest armour and belt will be found somewhere on the open world in the future after we are done with a quest that she can give.
• Changed the balancing of enemies so they start with more health but don't increase as much as it was before on the higher difficulty levels
• Hud now shows the health points, armour, damage, blood points and blood efficiency properly
• Some rats have been added to the dungeon. They should give Kalyskah more blood points so she can activate the blood buff more often.
• Now Kalyskah health will increase according to her Vigor, instead of strength.
• We turned the Texture Streaming on. This should improve the performance of some PCs. But it requires 4gb of memory
• Changed text on the pause menu, so now we have “Main Menu” written where it was “New Game” before
• Smoother combat camera and target acquisition
• Improved Kalysakah’s default and the short curly hairstyles
• Improved the way characters can change their postures and facial expressions while in dialogue
• Lipsync is now pre-processed instead of made in real-time based on the subtitles like it was before. So now Kalyskah will actually stop moving her mouth and move it again based on the audio and not on the text.
• Improved character creation camera controls. It won’t go up and down based on the options you are selecting, but you can now manually set the zoom, the height and also Kalyskah’s rotation

• Started to work on what will be the tutorial of the game. For now, the game pauses and explains how the combat works before you fight Michael. To open his door, you know need to defeat him.
• "Press E to Consume" is now displayed when Kalyskah is sneaking behind humanoid enemies. This will help people to know how biting mechanics work.
• Removed the barrel’s puzzle at the dungeon
• Fixed checkpoint on the dungeon that was making the player load inside of a pillar

Features:

• Fara, the Blacksmith, will now be able to buy items and to sell the Falchion and Estoc, weapons that can only be got by loot on the dungeon. (Notice that we haven't introduced job yet, so the only way to get gold at the moment is by selling your items or looting if from the chests at the dungeon or by making a small quest that Fara gives)

• New weapon: Falchion. There is only one NPC that can drop it on the dungeon, and it has 10% of chance... but don’t worry, if you can’t get it from him, you can buy it from Fara
• 2 new sets of armour: Leather and Seekers! (Leather armour can be bought from Fara after you finish a quest. Seekers armour can’t be got yet. There will be a quest in the future)
• Don’t try to break into a private home if the NPC left the door open, Kalyskah will be pushed back and say that she needs an invite to get in.
• Added a new window, Journal, press J to open it. There you can track your active quests and If you go to the Statistics tab you can see the number of partners Kalyskah had as well.
• Once per day, Kalyskah can get blood bags that restore 200 of her health from the nurse Jessie Sawmill.

Second Chance system overhaul:

• When falling in combat against the undead, the player now has 3 options:
• Taunt the enemy and try to kill him (Difficulty 15)
• Use sorcery to dispel the magic that is taking control of their mind (Difficulty 12) if the roll is succeeded, the player will be able to either seduce the enemy (difficulty 12) or use charisma to let him go (difficulty 8).
• The options are based on dice rolls, which are influenced by the player's attributes and the way Kalyskah is dressing (It's easier to taunt if she is menacing, but harder if she enticing. And it's easier to seduce if she is enticing or showing some skin).
• The flow of the second chance dialogue has also been changed and a few more lines have been added. 
• Please, let us know what you think about the rolling based on d20 RPG systems because we are discussing internally if it’s worth it or not, and your feedback will help us to decide if we will keep it as it is or simplify it.

Erotic animations rework (WIP):

• We added stamina and an arousal meter, where the stamina is slowly drained with time while the arousal raises when the characters are interacting with each other. Kalyskah fails if the characters on the scene lose their interest or get tired before reaching climax. There is an option to ask to ‘have a break’, which will cause the intercourse to stop and give both characters time to catch their breath, recovering their stamina bar while the arousal drops. Actions can be performed and they will raise the arousal faster, but also drains a bigger part of the stamina. Changing poses will also have a cost on the stamina. We haven’t added new poses based on player attributes or different interactions for this patch, although it won’t take too long for us to expand this since now, we have a new animator.

• The erotic scenes on this demo are not on their final version yet. In the future, the game will feature two types of erotic encounters:
• The modular and the story-driven ones. The modular are the ones from jobs like the courtesan or the ones that can be triggered on world events Those will use the system that we are experimenting and described above. The story-driven ones are not implemented in this version yet, but they will be more cinematographic and give the player choices of how Kalyskah can behave without all this interface and mechanics involved. To make it easier to picture, they will have camera and lights working more like the erotic scenes on Mass Effect or Witcher series, but with the player being able to control Kalyskah as if she was in a “dialogue with choices” … And with the twist that on our game we are actually showing the action ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
• New Poses: Holding hands, Deep throat, Kalyskah touching herself while giving a blowjob, all with interactions where Kalyskah can either be active or passive (Although the passive animation system has not been implemented yet). Many neutral poses and transitions were added as well.
• Reduced all those choices of poses and (cringe) things that Kalyskah could say before starting a sex scene to just one, that will start the new toysytem. Notice that the lesbian and splitroast scenes haven’t been tweaked yet. They won’t break the game, but they are not working as intended yet.

Known issues:

• If you are coming from version 0.7, we recommend you to delete the folder “Kalyskah_RPG” under your appdata folder. Otherwise you will see a lot of corrupted save slots when you open the save\load widget. If you just ignore them, you won’t have any trouble, but if you try to load the corrupted saves you will get a problem that the game might load the dungeon level without the quest that allow you to leave the first room.

Download

If you are not a patron, you can download the public demo by following this link. But we recommend you to get it through the itch app since it will auto-update the game when you have a new version to download.

Follow these instructions if you are a patron:

• First, you need to create an account on itch.io.
• VAMPIRE (Version 0.8): Link your account here, and download the game here. 
• NEONATE (Version 0.8): Link your account here, and download the game here. 
• ROYAL BLOOD (Testing 0.8): Link your account here, and download the game here.

Follow our work on Patreon, your support means a lot and it's what enables us to keep developing the game at a steady pace =)