Happy Labour Day/Golden Week. I wanted to write this devlog just before the submission to DD62, but itch ate it when I wanted to publish it, so this is a rewrite. 

Updates

• New boss: Mozilla Firefox Wandering Vixen Nia. 
• Tutorial redesign, rework + cutscenes
• General effects improvements
• Dialogue UI update
• Costume change function

Firefox

Nia's been in development for a while now, since as early as February, but it's taken a long time to really settle on how the boss fight should proceed. There's a bunch of elements I didn't manage to fit in this release, but on the other hand I also feel like it's hard to put much more into this design. 

Compared to the Japanese-style clothing Kiriko wears, Nia has more Chinese-styled clothing. Totally not because certain gacha game designs have had qipaos and cheongsams recently. 

There's still some texturing and details that I haven't added in, but the general shape and colour scheme should remain like this? (Maybe except for the blue belt around the waist). As for her attacks, she uses kicks, flames, hidden weapons, and her 2 folding fans (which are still placeholder assets). I also wanted to add some poison attacks to her arsenal as well, given her backstory, but facing poison without any means of clearing it doesn't seem fair to me, so it'll have to wait until I figure out how I want to do that. And yes, she would be a F/P mage with that combination. 

Her fans aren't fully modelled yet, but the concept I had was for the tips to be stabby points when closed and the edges to be sharp and cutty when opened. It's probably used more similarly to chakrams (open) and stilettos (closed) in that regard, and then when it's swung along the direction normal to the fan plane, it's for magic-type abilities. I think most games out there only have the fan swung in a way that slaps along the face of it, usually to throw out some kind of magic, and even fewer have it as a melee weapon. Which is to say, I really did not have a lot of reference material for this to go off of. I don't think I'll be doing such a non-standard weapon again for a while...

AI Updates

I recently posted a video that explains the new AI system. Basically, each attack you use is gradually learned, and this increases the probability that it will be blocked, and then once it's above a certain threshold it'll be deflected. On one hand, using the same attacks over and over will be less effective, and the damage you can do is reduced, but on the other hand, it beats a purely random 75% chance on cooldown that I was using before. 

Bosses in action games typically boil down to waiting for an opening, and then punishing that opening with your own attacks. However, the degree at which you can punish varies between each game. Souls mainline games typically only give you time for a few attacks, while Khazan's approach is to let you combo and stagger in a game of resource management to maximise damage from limited stamina. In Sekiro, openings to attack are rare and they usually get blocked fairly quickly. Typically, there's a rhythm of deflect -> hit -> hit (blocked) -> hit (deflected) -> enemy attacks, which makes it very predictable. And since most attacks are going to get blocked, most combat arts don't really get utilized as much, aside from Mortal Draw (unblockable) and Ichimonji (restores posture). 

Which is where this new system comes into play:

1. You can squeeze out more damage beyond just a single counter hit during your "turn" by taking advantage of moves the AI hasn't seen recently. 
2. Instead of sticking to the exact same sequence, the AI might end up blocking your attack, forcing you to come up with a new attack to use.
3. However, unlike Khazan where stagger windows are few but long, stagger windows here will be short and very frequent. So you can mess up your combo all you want, and it won't matter too much in the grand scheme of things. 
4. Since the bosses in this game are similarly-sized humanoids, they don't have the extreme stagger resistance that you normally see in games like Elden Ring, so hitting them during their recovery can start your combo off that flinch. 

I think the Nia fight only really clicked after adding this. Louise doesn't have too much from this because she's an airhead who can only remember 5 attacks at once, but Nia's a smart woman that can remember around 8 or 9 attacks. It'll probably have to be changed later on as I implement the rest of the player attacks, though. 

Off the top of my head, I can list the following actions:

• 4 normal attacks + 3 charged variants for C1, C2, C3
• Deflect counter slash and counter kick
• Charged and uncharged kick
• Iai slash (attack input), jump (jump input) after holding the stance
• Throwing knife - grounded and aerial are treated as 2 separate actions, follow-up chasing slice is 1 more.
• Dodge attack, dodge charged attack, and sprint attack
• Jump slash - uncharged and uncharged

So actually, there's a lot of attacks available, just that most of them are going to be the 4 NAs. In this update, dodge attacks and counters can now also chain into C2, so that should help to reduce the reliance on the N1/C1 attack. 

Future Plans

I'll be working on getting a Steam page set up soon. I've been looking around r/gamedevclassifieds and similar places, but I haven't found a capsule artist that fits what I'm going for. I might end up going with  @5jiraaaaa's art again, but I'd like to explore some other artists first. If you know of or are a capsule artist that does anime-style art, please reach out in the comments/DMs/etc. 

There's still a lot of placeholder assets and content that I'd like to polish up before I put it together into Steam, so that will be the focus from now on. If it's a trailer, then I might need to start working on the next boss as well for that variety, and there's still UI work to do. 

If things go well, I should be able to get a Steam page up by the end of this month, but realistically it's more likely to be up in June. I still haven't decided on a final title for this game, although if things stretch on that far without any better ideas I'll just go with the current title. There's also been a sizable Japanese audience I've found on Twitter, so I'll also need to look for translators. 

Demo Day 63 is the next deliverable target in September, and I'm hoping to do:

• Complete player moveset
• AI Rework
• Complete UI design and fix up menus
• More story content + improving dialogue systems

Also, with the new costume functionality, I want to give every boss some kind of unlockable costume for the player. I recently changed the Addressables package to this fork which allows external catalogs to be built together, so it's now possible to provide extra bonus content  like DLC costumes without bundling it with the base game. I think I'll add a similar dress as the reward for defeating Nia, but I'm open to any suggestions for this and any other costumes.