Devlog: Kyu Or Kiera? Roguelike Design, MattMcMuscles?! More!

Hey crew! SB here It's been a good ass few weeks (very productive) and wanted to share an update on what's cooking. Internally we've been busy with a few things.

ROGUELIKE/LITE DESIGN UPDATE:

We just wrapped work on our Fighting Roguelite design document, which will lay out our game plan for the prototype we work on. We've been concepting up ideas and discussing pretty intensely.

One thing I/we realized is that a key to making the fighting game mode feel not repetitive is interesting mobs with mechanics that challenge the players in new ways. So I've been designing up a plethora of enemies that fit the Badlands theme we're going off of for our Zone 1 prototype. Humor I think will be important as well...My favorite roguelikes got really creative with the themes they had. Looking over the assets we had, I realized the junk/discarded theme could be expanded on.

So lets share one example, meet FRIDGE™. Fridge is one of the more cute and approachable enemies you'll encounter during the rogue mode, but is actually a box of concentrated death. Fridge will come in Mark I to Mark IV varieties, each with their own set of dirty tools to take you out and ruin your day. Fridge™ will be impossible to knock down due to their weight. Fridge™ will have heavy doors that smack you in the face if you harrass them up close too much.

Mark II and III fridges will have proton cannon attacks that whittle away at your health, booby traps, shielding and other nasty surprises. These ideas seem like they'll add that variety needed to make playing this mode memorable, as well as teaching players how to deal with different scenarios.

Other ideas are still in rough state/early concept, but we are trying to carry over all the Badlands work/theme/story we developed over to this. (Also no promises on Mark IV Fridge™, but I think it would be hilarious). Now that we have the design doc ready hoping to get moving on this very soon.

And we think it'll be very interesting, team seems pretty excited to get started.

Kyu Or Kiera?

We are also still mulling work between starting Kyu or Kiera shortly. They both have their own unique set of challenges present.

Queen Kyu & Co:

As she's going to be a hybrid grappler with tools (she'll be able to summon royal guards as utility option), and we haven't seen much of her as of late- She might be worth tackling first. We updated her model (the old one is ROUGH and not intended for close up) to not be unusable and are hoping to get her rigged up soon to be fighting game viable. And yes, the bean eyes persist.

Doing a grappling character will also help us wrap our minds around tackling a character that is less 'shoto' like and less reliant on fireballs.

Kiera:

We are still discussing internally how we handle rage vs non rage modes. There's a few options here. Main concerns are regarding the difficult of a 2 in 1 character. Main points of contention:

A) She's blue Kiera till she does a super and rages out then reverts (Most cost effective)

B) She's blue Kiera until she gets an install that can allow her to transform temporarily (Medium/High Difficulty)

C) We separate Kiera Blue and Kiera Red into separate characters (Viable till we get budget to do a full new set for Kiera Red for example)

Already have a moveset in mind for her, but without a proper budget atm we have to be very strategic with how we proceed on Kiera.

Obviously everyone is a huge Kiera fan. That last tweet did some numbers, probably broke a record for us. We just reposted that gif as we have a completely new audience. Also some Vtuber absolutely blew it up called Buffpup. Has like 165k followers or something crazy like that.

Matt McMuscles Joins The Squad

Not officially announced yet but Matt McMuscles has joined our squad as well just recently. It's not officially announced yet but his knowledge of gamedev and love of fighting games was a perfect fit, and he's a super friendly guy. We spent the last month kind of chatting about what we're hoping to do and he's been fantastic. He's the third creator that's going to be helping us out with feedback and dev, joining Justin Wong and JMCrofts. Check out his stuff!

Speaking of Justin and JM, they've been busy touring but have still been sneaking in playtests. This is helping us polish up Volley to a mirror finish.

Hitboxes

Not as interesting, but a task that took up a good chunk of our time in the last month was completely rebuilding the hitbox system. We were using a capsule/round system that was causing a lot of inconsistent behavior for hit registration so we decided to foundationally rebuild it to resemble a more classic 'square' hitbox system. Added a visualizer tool as well so we can assess things on the fly. JM/Justin made us aware that the old system had a problem, so we had to rebuild hitboxes for something like 100 moves manually. Glad to be over with and we're still fine tuning as we go.

Character Select/UI Work

With the help of our friend Schmerp, we are starting work also on updating UI internally. First step, character select. We'll have 3d animated avatars which our Canuck animator (Napmaster, she's amaziing) is working on.

Plushes/Diamond Stuff

 I'm working on packing orders now that the Kiera plushes have finally arrived! We know there was a delay but I think you'll all be pleased with the mega package, a specific post for Diamond heads will be posted soon with details. This will be a chunky offering.

Thanks for joining us again and let's chat in the Discord. It's been a decent month for progress.