16-02-24 -- First Public Demo Release

Hello!

I am very excited to say that the first public demo of SBH has been released! It's only a short demo, containing the first six fights of the game devoid of their story context, but I am hoping it should be a fun and accurate representation of the final game's combat system.

This post is mostly going to be a ramble about my experience with making the demo and specific system mechanics, so I'd recommend playing it first if you haven't. You can download here, or from the new Itch.io page.

I've spent the last two weeks passing the demo around friends, and studying the way in which they played. It was a both really exciting and horrifying experience to see other people play it for the first time, as while the response was generally positive towards the central mechanics and feel of the game, it revealed a lot of flaws in the tutorials I had been completely oblivious to.

Difficulty, especially, was a major issue, as I watched players of many different skill levels repeatedly succumb to my poor damage number estimations in fights that weren't meant to be hard. As an action game that heavily focuses on learning and memorizing enemy attacks, I've tried to be conscious that I (as the person who is painstakingly animating all of the attacks) will have a very big advantage when playtesting. Unfortunately, I was still way off the mark.

One of the biggest changes to difficulty was to the rate at which the player's posture is recovered, which increased from restoring 4% on a successful parry to 13%(!) on a successful parry. It was clear from testing that at the frequency that players were missing parries, their posture was draining at a far faster rate than it could be recovered, leading them to inevitably be knocked down. I want combat, especially against bosses, to feel sort of like a constant 'tug-of-war', where the player can come back from a disadvantage almost as easily as they fall into it, and I'm hoping that a much stronger way to recover posture will help with that.

It's very funny to finally see the problems that being a solo developer can make you blind to. I feel like I learned a lot from finally seeing other people play the game, and I am hoping by now releasing it publicly, I can learn a lot more from the feedback I receive. :)

On a tangential note, I think the only thing about the demo I'm unhappy with is the music, which at the moment, is mostly placeholder music borrow from other video games (which are credited within the demo). It feels a little embarrassing, but making or finding battle music is obviously at the very bottom of my priorities right now. That being said, I would like to try create my own tracks for the game in the future--I feel like there's a lot of room to express personality in the music connected to specific characters and scenes. Although, I'm not much of a composer, so I might end up commissioning battle music for the game when the time comes...

With the demo out of the way, I think I'm going to take a short break (as much as I don't want to). I know I have a habit of overworking myself, and I think a week or two of doing something else would be good for me.

Going forward, I think I'll let the coding and spriting rest for a while, and shift back to drafting the script. As I figure out more of the fine details of the story, I can hopefully start designing the overworld and sandbox with more confidence, and begin getting into the real 'meat' of the game. Although, it'll be difficult to hold back my excitement for creating the fishing minigame...

As a bonus to everyone reading the blog, here's some footage of my favorite bug I encountered during the creation of the demo--one in which Livio's momentum deceleration stopped working, leading to combat I found very funny. It sort of makes me want to include "ice physics" as a secret cheat code in the final game, haha.

Thank you for reading!

- Topaz