This week I updated the Axeman enemy by giving him a new character mesh, so he’s visually distinct from the Swordsman. I also changed his lunge attack to strike from above, adding a bit more verticality to the action.
On the technical side, I optimized performance by converting the level to World Partition, and I fixed several bugs, including one where enemies would shift slightly in front of the player with each hit.
Crates can be smashed with a dash, it’s super satisfying to watch wooden pieces fly everywhere.
There are "super weapons" like the axe: they deal more damage than your main weapon, but break after about ten hits, so use them wisely.
A strong tactic is to parry, which grants you a short window of invincibility. Perfect moment to land a heavy attack and hit multiple enemies at once.
This stage is a bit dark visually, hope it still comes through okay despite video compression.
Lately I’ve been doing a lot of gameplay bug fixing, things like adding the ability to skip cutscenes, fixing broken UI, and dealing with enemies getting stuck, so I don’t have much new content to show.
Here’s one of my playtests from Stage 4. I still need to tweak the enemy lighting in this stage, but they’re already fairly visible.
This past week I focused on several fixes that were already planned for release, but I decided to push them early to improve the demo experience.
One of the biggest updates is a new blue flash overlay to indicate when an enemy is vulnerable to a front stab, this should make combat feedback much clearer. I’ve also added a new VFX that triggers when an enemy is defeated to further improve combat feedback, along with a green visual cue when picking up healing items.
Thanks to various gameplay videos, I’ve been able to spot and polish several small details as well.
Even though the demo isn’t among the most popular ones out there, I’m genuinely happy with the progress, creating a game like this in my free time is already a challenge, and just having it out there means a lot to me.
