Summit Hut

 

To add on to yesterday, I have another stage that is now mostly finished but needs more enemies and polish to the visuals. The snowy stage I posted yesterday is still around half way done and is probably the second or third largest one I will make. Hopefully I can have the rest of the parts to it finished within the week. I'm still however at 4 stages left not started at all, all of them are not part of the main path that leads to the end but mostly are still required to complete the game. Besides that I made some more items and weapon types I won't reveal yet, and the ability to increase the number of item/weapon slots is now there, though the ingame requirements to do so aren't finished yet. 

 

I'm considering making another demo, since I know many are constantly wondering about it. But there's honestly only one or two more areas that I think should be added to it, so I don't know what the time frame will be yet. Before January is possible but not super likely and I also have to think about where I'll be staying again soon.

Forest Foes

 I've been moving around a lot lately and am no longer living where I have been the last 5 years, or even permanently settled where I am now, so it's been a little harder for me to focus on development than usual. But I've gotten back to a more steady pace for now at least.

Risa's animations are just about finished though still needs a lot of play testing, another major character Skye whose role I haven't touched on much still needs work but is about 2/3s done animation wise.

A lot of people are probably expecting to see more H content here but understand that VD has a limited amount of that and I don't want to show everything too early. The female characters Sayomi, Hano, along with Risa and a couple others can get grabbed by enemies as well, so I have to keep the amount just for Kotone at reasonable level.

Stages wise I haven't made much progress TBH since the late update, still around 4 left that need to be started. The one water stage I made a gif of before felt slightly bland and I ended up mostly redesigning. Also a few still need music which I'm trying to get to now. One thing I want to improve is the save areas in between the stages, I feel like some more secrets or sidequests added to them might help make the world feel a bit more alive, but that's still up in the air for now.

Short Vivid Dead Update

 

I've had a bit of rough time the last few weeks getting everything done  that I wanted. While I've been trying to avoid it as much as possible, I  had to go back and rebuild some areas a in order to fit with changes made to the game's flow, and ultimately decided to remove some stages that I was planning so that I could put more effort into other areas of the game that I think still need it. Some parts of the cut areas I merged into  the existing ones however. At this point there's 5 stages left I know I  definitely need to make, and the ones already there now mostly just need more polish and tweaks. There's also some enemies, items, NPC I still  need to make and add to them.  Like I said before, VD won't likely be a very long game but I don't want  to give away the total number of stages just yet. The castle area, as  you can maybe guess is the last one, which very early on, before I changed the art style, was going to be a hub and the player would be  traveling to different worlds Portrait of Ruin style, but I later thought it would be better to have the player work their way to the  castle so you could see it in background in later areas.

 

 

Tight Spot

There hasn't been a proper devlog in a while so I think this time I'll give a little more information on what's been developed so far.

I already shown some changes to Kotone's moveset. You can now aim paint manually by using the strong attack key and you can now crouch and attack with other weapons besides the kodachi. The dash attack I decided to remove entirely however, as I found it wasn't that useful and had too many end frames making the combat feel stiffer than it should, so instead holding forward and attacking for now just does a regular high slash regardless of the weapon Kotone has equipped. The dash attack animation is still used with some weapons however.

I also made changes to the way the stages are structured and how the player progresses so that the game won't feel quite as linear. The idea I had at first was to have each area be mostly linear with the stages being unlocked after the previous one is cleared, but with the option of finding a secret goal that would open a different route(This is the reason 1-3 has a blocked off path currently).

That will most likely still be the case in the final version, though now clearing the stage normally won't always open up a new stage, the player will have to search the stages more carefully for certain key items(in addition to the blue flames) and finish the stage in order to progress. Because of this though, the stages will now be generally shorter and easier to reach the exit, sometimes within less than a minute, but they'll be harder to "fully complete" if that makes sense. So some stages will take multiple replays at different points in the game in order to find everything.

One last thing is I teased an NPC in the last screenshot I posted before this devlog, and though I want the game to have more NPCs VD is going to stay very light on story and dialogue, as writing is another thing I struggle at and had a lot of difficulty while making Moon Rhapsody. I can say that it does have a story, though until I get around to making an opening cutscene you'll just have to use your imagination.

Regarding NSFW scenes which is what most people seem to mainly care about, VD will have more sexual content and animations, but it's not a guarantee that there will be very many or that there will be things like a gallery mode or MR's captured scenes. With that said I don't like promoting the game as an H game because some people may, and still often do come into it expecting lewd content to be the main focus, but that does not mean I'm opposed to adding more.

Fountain in the Rain

 

Since all the basic mechanics are done I'm likely going to spend the next few months just doing level design. How many levels it'll have I won't say, the game will probably not take very long to beat, but I'm aiming to make it open ended enough that the player has reasons to revisit areas multiple times.

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.

v3.1.2 Update

 

Version 3.1 for the demo is now available for everyone to play. I'm sorry if there have been people waiting a long time to see this update, this version contains the option for Japanese and I wanted to be extra thorough making sure every line of text was accounted for, with that said a few things in the JP version are not translated yet and some things may definitely still need editing, but it's mostly stuff nonessential. There are also of course several fixes from 3.0 to this version:

Changes from 3.0.3:

• Nyx's mode has a new dungeon that can be accessed after the first one.
  
• The Sky Garden Temple has been redesigned.
  
• Nyx's portion of the overworld is bigger and rearranged in some spots.
  
• Sasha's dungeons have changes to certain rooms.
  
• Grab system is different, instead of mashing to escape you only have to hold down the jump key. However there is a variable time limit to how long you have to escape. You have the option to attack enemies for a large amount of SP to immediately escape, but it can fail under some conditions. Many enemies also can't continuously grab the player as easily as older versions. Some new items added.
  
• A couple new enemies added.
  
• Game should run better and not be as likely to crash when closing.
  
• Special art is displayed depending on the results when finishing the demo.