Crimson Keep News: 1 year of Crimson Keep!

Hey everyone, Ian here. We've had a tiresome couple of weeks between sickness and busy-ness, but have still managed to get some interesting stuff done. Let's take a look!

Testers and people reading this blog have been requesting a way to block attacks for quite awhile. I knew it was something we'd eventually get to. This is our attempt to make it a little different than the standard fare however. Each weapon has a parry state that it goes into at some point in its swing (prior to damage triggering). If an enemy attack would hit you and you are in the parry state, you successfully parry. Parrying results in a effect that differs depending on the weapon type (weapon types are the next big feature on the table). A successful parry could mean a free heal for the player, stuns for the enemy, and everything in between. Different weapons will also have different size parry windows. And of course there is a natural balance between weapon speed and parrying: you do more dps the faster your weapon is, but it is inherently harder to parry.

We're just trying this out at the moment, it mainly came about as a solution to the fact that the typical user's mouse doesn't have enough buttons. (Right click is going to be reserved for special weapon specific abilities). Some PC games that have a large moveset, like Chivalry, make you use the mouse wheel, and mouse wheel click, but that's always felt sloppy to me and I imagine for most players it is not ideal. This form of parrying saves us from giving players another key to memorize, and also results in the occasional accidental parrying when swords cross, which is kind of cool. Let us know what you think about this system.

We can now drop items! Although the gif doesn't show it, it's very intuitive. Dragging the item out into the middle of the screen drops the item on the ground. A simple but important feature when you only have so much space in that inventory! When we get around to adding deities and other quest-ish type stuff, this could become a more integral mechanic. Things like offering items to gods in exchange for favor or a chance at a different item could be pretty fun and interesting.

With our new animation system (floating hand things instead of a complicated first person rig with many bones) it became much easier for me to quickly add and iterate on first person animations. One of the products of this will be cool animations for item interactions. I feel that visual and audio feedback for every action is a must, so something like seeing the potion you drink or food you eat is a pretty cool feature, that many first person games seem to leave out. The first person rig being simple static 3d objects also opens the door for easily making cool buff effects like transformations. All we really have to do is swap a model and create an animation set, and we're good.

You see here an unidentified potion, it fumes with purple smoke. You throw caution to the wind and taste it. You are now a velociraptor. Is this awesome yes/no?

Also, Ben and I have officially been working on Crimson Keep for 1 year!!!! So that's pretty cool! Thank you everyone for your support for our game. Your positive comments and feedback have really helped this project's momentum and we are very grateful.

-Ian