Kandria

Oh bugger

After the last monthly update I did want to take a break with the weeklies for one time, but I did not want to miss it again last week. I did remember to do it several times, but then pushed it aside again and, as these things go, forgot until it was too late.

Sorry about that.

Well, the good news is that I have started to work on Kandria again, though only a little bit. I've started working on the first enemy, mostly because I realised using the player sprites for enemy testing was really terrible. Player animations are tuned for fast response and don't have a lot of lead-up frames that let you know an attack is going to start. With the first enemy in place I should have a much better base to test and tune combat and AI.

This first enemy is a type of wolf that evolved for life in underground caverns. I'm mostly done with the required animations already, and have also started to put it into the game.

https://courier.tymoon.eu/api/courier/file/view?id=hO13L2JA5mpWIvdE1RZOog%3D%3D

The idea behind this enemy is relatively simple: it'll always try to keep a certain distance to you, and then launch towards you for a biting attack. It can jump over obstacles of a certain height too, but can't climb cliffs or crawl through gaps, so you can potentially avoid them by sneaking around or fleeing to higher ground.

Ultimately I'd like to have every type of enemy have a very distinctive type of range behaviour. Meaning that they'll all behave differently depending on their proximity to the player. Other enemy types I've already got planned for now are a malfunctioning droid that'll try to rush towards you like a berserker, and a turret that always attempts to shoot you from a distance.

I think that basing the combat around range rather than attack patterns should make it fit much better with the platforming elements the game has, and distinguish it from other, similar games as well. We'll see how it all turns out though...

Anyway, my time this week will be cut very short if not out completely, as the end of the university semester is right around the corner and there's project submission deadlines all over, a big one being next Saturday. I hope you'll allow me some more time to properly get back into gear with Kandria's development.

Summer will probably also not turn out to be as productive as last year's – when Kandria was properly started. This is mostly due to the current university schedule of deadlines and exams in general, which has turned out to be very unfavourable for me. This has caused me a lot of pain and frustration, and is also a large reason why I've been so down in the dumps and unable to work efficiently for a while now.

I'll still try to push through and hopefully just pass the two courses I have. If not, well, then I'll probably just focus on Kandria 100% and give up on my Master's.

My next steps for Kandria will be to finish the few missing animations for the wolf, then revise the movement AI, and finally to tune the combat to be more pleasant to play. After that I'll publish another demo update. Hopefully I'll get some more good feedback from you to make it even better!

Currently the AI is rather rough, but you can see a short demo of it here:

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And that's all I had to say for... last week. I promise I won't forget again this week!