Devlog #36 - Current state and progress on Kalyzmyr

Hello everyone, I’ve been extremely exhausted since I returned from the expo. I've been pushing myself to do lots of things at once, my greedy nature taking its toll on my mental health again and again. We also shipped a new game called “Oh Sheep!”(video will be removed from our account once the publisher puts it in their account) with our friends we met at a game jam in the meantime, which should be released soon on Steam. I believe I’m also suffering from Carpal Tunnel syndrome since my right hand has had a numb sensation for the last two days. I don’t really know much about it but I’m hoping to avoid anything serious by taking care of my hand somehow.

For a while I’ve been wanting to return to Kingdom Lost badly, but I don’t want to return before I’m done with Kalyzmyr and I think I’m done with the side projects. I didn’t really care about Kalyzmyr at the beginning, but the beautiful art in that game made me attached to the project and I just couldn’t leave it alone. And I also started to love the idea behind the game, I didn’t like the game one bit at the beginning. Even though it was my idea, my execution was poor and the game felt extremely lacking.

I’m pretty weak when it comes to game design and I’ve been blowing my mind on that subject for a long time now. I’m confident in my programming skills now, unlike when I first started making games, but I’m lacking heavily in this design so I’m trying to take as much feedback as I can. To be honest, creating the basic mechanics is really easy, but fine tuning them to give the right feeling can be challenging, especially when I’m trying to do both at the same time, and it’s often exhausting.

Anyway, as for what I’ve been doing for Kalyzmyr, I’ve added a small intro to the game and I'm expanding on the tutorial, making it more interactive and in depth.

Changed Berserk mechanics, Smyrna will be running faster in Berserk mode, auto-attacking objects and triggering a QTE when near to an enemy, successful hits will deal heavy damage. Smyrna will also always attack at full speed in Berserk mode and players can still manually attack as fast as they can press the keys.

Attacking is now also changed, Smyrna will always be auto attacking but players can increase her attack speed by pressing attack keys. Added heavy attack, its damage is multiplied with your current attack speed. Closer to the maximum attack speed, higher damage but it resets your attack speed.

Placeable walls are removed from the defense phase; there will be new kinds of traps instead; I'm thinking about poison pool(dot) and ice trap(slow). There is now only one big wall that protects Smyrna from enemy raids. Smyrna now also can throw axes, javelin or hammer. Each weapon will have its own different effects on enemies. There will also be a special attack when the Fury is at %100.

Chests now drop three different crafting materials; iron scrap, artifact piece and draconite piece. Iron scrap will be used to upgrade weapons and armor, artifact pieces for upgrading artifacts, four draconite pieces will create one draconite and draconite will probably be used to upgrade skills, but I’m still thinking on that.

Added a new score system, every action is evaluated and added to your score. This will be the deciding factor on the leaderboards with the upcoming update(leaderboards will reset on release). Time will still play an important role on the leaderboards.

Reduced enemy attack speed and increased their damage. Main purpose of this is adding defensive skills to each armor. Currently the first two armor has dodge and block skill, I’m still thinking about the last armor skill.