There is also has a simple triangle based tile grid building system. Press "T" to tilt a placeable object.
Everything is currently in early development, this demo is primarily to showcase the combat & building mechanic and receive some feedback on it, being more of a playtest rather than a game release.
​Useful playtest commands (open/close the console terminal with the "/" key)
Press V to toggle camera view. Scrolling while in 3rd person also zooms the camera in and out.
As an early access demo, there's bound to be some bugs, and plenty of undeveloped content, so I would appreciate any bug reports/general feedback.
Legal disclaimer: Both of the aforementioned game mechanics are copyrighted.
This post will go over several improvements to the current state of Blade Ballad, starting with manual weapon rotation, NPC combat movement, and inventory, in that order.
The manual weapon rotation has always existed prior to this version, but based its rotation off mouse position, whereas now is based off mouse magnitude, or the vector that the mouse has been moved relative to the center of the screen. The advantage with this new approach is that you don't have to recenter the mouse, so your attack angle is much more responsive to changes. I did notice some conflicting controls with the manual controls and the attack angle that is set when you initiate an attack, which also responds to mouse magnitude. While not a bug, I should add a setting to disable this. A chevron also displays when you are rotating your weapon, and indicates the target angle at which your blade will rotate to.
The manual rotation also involves some extra settings which can be fine tuned in the Configs>Controls tab when paused.
You can also rebind the key which toggles the rotation, which can be done in the Keybinds tab.
Attacking with a heavy swing (holding down the left mouse) also cause damage to its target on its backswing, which makes it more useful when it has to compensate for a longer swing time.
Now onto the focus of this post, which is on NPCs. This took up the bulk of the time in this release, but it was quite important since swordplay is central to the game so I was fine putting other tasks like worldbuilding to the side. In general, I implemented the following:
Finally, there is the rework of the inventory system, with the changes as follows:
Fixed the "add_item" console command as well. Turns out I forgot to include the class in the final build.
Cool new blood effects as well, thanks to a YouTube tutorial from Asqa Nadeem, and I used the Overlay blending option in the shader setting, which created those darker areas where there's a higher concentration of blood sprites.
The first public release of Blade Ballad is out as an early access demo. It introduces standard game systems and a Placeables building system. NPCs and...
This release improved NPC movement and smoothed out janky NPC combat swings (mostly), implemented inventory gear condition degradation, and fixed the...
This release improved NPC movement and smoothed out janky NPC combat swings (mostly), implemented inventory gear condition degradation, and fixed the...
This is an early demo (macOS), so it's more for playtesting. That being said, it's pretty stable and has most of the core systems for a video game in...
This is a demo (Windows), so it's more for playtesting. That being said, it's pretty stable and has most of the core systems for a video game in place.