Monday, September 5, 2022

Nocturne Update #3

 

So I'm aware I haven't said a word about Moon Rhapsody in a very long time now, which I'm sure many people who are reading this would come here to see but I spent the last few months mostly working on Nocturne because MR is unfortunately going to still take a long time to develop before I can show anymore progress, and Nocturne I can work on faster at the moment since the gameplay and engine is a little simpler.
Which though it's making decent progress and is fully playable. Still isn't at a point where I want to show any gameplay of it yet. This is because some elements I think still need to decide on how they're going to work exactly.
Like for example I initially had designed the stages in a loop fashion where the player would go to a certain point, defeat an enemy collect an item and return to the entrance, and the stages would change in certain ways while going back. But this idea I decided to scrap because I felt it raised complications with replaying some areas, and I wanted to keep the sense of always moving forward towards a goal. Also I wanted every stage to have a boss enemy that needed to be defeated, but it would have probably meant either multiple reskins or less stages, and I feel like this game is better off down playing the combat anyway.
So what I can say about the gameplay is the design will feel similar to anyone who's played a Metroid game, there are different weapons that break different kinds of blocks, you run very quickly and can wall jump and grab ledges, and you occasionally need to backtrack to find an ability to open a path. But the game is broken into stages and the player's weapons are lost if they die or fail and may need to be recovered to make progress. Though the main character always has default weapons they can use to attack with, and there's no durability or stamina system if anyone wants to know about that. 


The ghost girl I shown in one screen is not the protagonist or an NPC, just a strong enemy. Most of the enemies don't pose a large threat besides being obstacles to avoid running into, but a few encountered throughout stages guard valuables and needed items. Also lastly, as the name implies, the game mostly is set in night environments as ghosts are the primary enemy and certain ones need to be hunted to clear the areas completely. The player can use regular weapons to defeat ghosts, but like in MR it's better to use magic and lightning based attacks especially to defeat them quickly.
That's it for now, I will try to post more updates soon but probably not gifs or videos until October or so, though my goal is to get the game to at least close to a half way finished state before putting out any demos.