Posts from January 2025

18/1/2025 -- Combat Demo 1-25 Update

Hey! I figured it was about time I update the Combat Demo again to better reflect the current state of the game. You can download the newest version here, or the itch.io page!

This update is mainly focused on aesthetic upgrades rather than gameplay changes. The most noteworthy additions are:

• A new soundtrack of four original battle themes, replacing all of the placeholder tracks used in previous versions of the demo (finally!!!).
• Unique, fully complete arenas for all fights in the demo, reflecting the locations each fight actually takes place in in the game's story. There's a handful of weapons and new breakable props present on every stage.
• An additional battle between the 3rd and 4th tutorial fights.
• A new difficulty setting for 'advanced enemy movesets', which, when enabled, will grant some bosses additional attacks and combo strings that can make their fights more difficult. Currently, the only enemy this affects is Livio, and enables the use of his 'backstep chain swipe' attack, as well as allowing him to use it as a follow-up to his low kick.
• Unique sprites for the enemies in the first and second tutorial fights, reflecting the appearance of the story characters involved.

There's also probably a handful of other minor tweaks and changes that I'm forgetting since it's been six months since the last update, but most core gameplay elements should be the same as the 6-24 version.

As always, please report any bugs or unintentional-seeming behavior encountered, and thank you for playing!

- HSTopaz

4/1/2025 -- Finished Livio Boss Fight & Dynamic Battle Intro

Hello, and happy new year! :)

I've began work on the game's second chapter, and decided to start by fully finishing Livio's boss fight, which happens towards the very start of it. It's mostly the same as it was in the demo, but now has a fully finished background, a unique fight intro, and a battle theme!

I've wanted to do unique boss battle intros forever, and ended up being inspired by the way old fighting games would sometimes make unique matchup intros by making mini cutscenes out of the pre-existing attack animations. I find something about it charming, and I think it's a nice compromise to avoid making too many unique sprites just for intros. I also like how the title card came out--I'd like to give every boss a uniquely styled font for their name. :)

I've also finished a demo of Livio's boss music that you can hear here! I'm pretty happy with it as is, but I probably need to polish it up a little more--I might do an individual clean upload of it once I'm done with that.

For some boring bonus trivia, there's actually a small bug I noticed in the video, in which the 35 damage Saki takes from the grab attack at 0:40 doesn't get added to the 'damage taken' total on the result screen. That's because in the game's code, the grab animation is treated as a cutscene instead of an attack, and I forgot to make the cutscene 'damage' event add to the total.

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Unfortunately, posts might be sparse for a while longer, as I've still got a lot of menial cutscene work ahead of me that won't be fun to talk about.

But until later, thanks for reading! - HSTopaz