Kesashi's Gallery

[Suuper-san]

I love Tier 3 definitely. The pose and the costume.
it feels strange to go to trousers for tier 2 and then back to a dress for tier 3 though, just my thoughts.
But the design of all of them is lovely.

[legomaestro]

Man oh man these outfits are amazing! Beautiful work!

[L.K. [Taikichi]]

Well it's been a while with all the stuff happening I'm working on getting back into the groove of making Blade Regalia. I've reached some important milestones in AI development in the game. Currently the AI can play 5 different characters effectively. Right now their difficulty can be controlled by manipulating the AI's "reaction time", "ranged weapon accuracy", and "movement accuracy". So Blade Regalia will start releasing playable builds just like Izabel.

I recorded some gameplay, I'm hoping to get some time to do some commentary, maybe even discussion the metagame with my character designer. And it's strange, but I'm starting to run out of characters to design. This would make 103 out of 150. Here are some new characters: Camilla, Katelyn, and a redesign of a character named Behemoth.

If you're curious about the lore of some of these

Camilla is a servant of the royal family of a kingdom called "Dulong Kingdom", or "The Long Kingdom". Camilla would be the second-highest ranking servant, Jianna being the first (picture below). So she would be called a "Right Hand Fleur" and Jianna would just be a "Right Hand". The interesting thing about the Dulong Kingom is that it's a country floating in the sky inhabited by black people who speak french. It's one of the strangest things I've created, not counting Izabel. It's actually a late-game place where Blade Regalia ends.

Katelyn is an Inquisitor whose job is to make sure "Regalia" is under control. Regalia being the clothing that provides each character with their unique, supernatural powers. Regalia has a negative effect on the environment, along with just being a deadly weapon, so inquisitors judge countries and their use of it. Themselves having the most powerful Regalia (not including dulong kingdom which would take ages to explain).

Behemoth is a "Formless Spirit" (e.g. demon) who was defeated and lost almost all of her power. Originally she was a gigantic monster, now she's a small girl because that's the best "form" she can produce. She has an uncontrollable desire to kill or hurt people, so the leader of the Formless forces her to wear the mitts and keep her mouth covered to make her more harmless. She was actually sealed into the "Accursed Sword" (picture below) which is used by a character named Tara. The Accursed Sword is notorious for influencing the wielder's mind and compelling them to kill people. When she is released from the sword is when we get access to her as a character. She also has an extremely deep, masculine voice.

If you're curious about their gameplay.
Camilla is a highly mobile ranged support hero. She has the ability to operate "between dimensions" which allows her to enter an intangible state to avoid damage as well as fly and move around more quickly.

Katelyn's abilities are still being decided. Her abilities are time themed, and it's likely it will function similar to the time abilities in the game "Blades of Time" since stopping, slowing, and speeding up time has already been used in another character. The only thing left is turning time backwards. May also play with the concept of a Time Limit such as abilities that need to be used within a specific time frame or at a specific time, like waiting for one half of the hourglass to empty.

Behemoth is a support hero who provides stamina and damage boosts to teammates. She's supposed to have the ability to take the form of another player's character.

Camilla

Katelyn

Behemoth

Jianna

Old Behemoth Design

Tara and the Accursed Sword

[legomaestro]

I'm stuck between Camilla and Tara. Love their designs. A third would be Katelyn because that hour-glass hammer is genius.

You have a knack for designing outfits Kesashi. If you could give a number how much percent would you say you're done with making Blade Regalia?

[L.K. [Taikichi]]

Actually I do have a tracker for BR progress on characters. It's not fully up to date, but it can give some insight. I might be slightly inspired by you and suuper. This file shows a general look at where characters are and it adds up to about 25% done on the prototype and 8% done for the kickstarter campaign. Here's also a character select screen I've put together based which characters have 3D models and I imagine will be playable for the prototype. And right now there are 9 out of 24 characters you can actually play. 5/9 the AI can play, and 4/9 have all of their abilities fully programmed.

I should mention this is actually 1 of 2 projects with Blade Regalia. There is a singleplayer project and a multiplayer project. So this is the singleplayer story campaign of Blade Regalia. It was originally called "The First Inquisition". Because the the multiplayer game where these characters come from takes place during "The Second Inquisition". This was supposed to give some background to what happens in the past. But I thought it would be nice to also play as the main cast, so this project will actually go through the full story starting with the present day (The Second Inquisition). The Singleplayer project happens to be easier to develop.

I forgot to mention the footage I took where I show the AI interacting with each other. It's in a map made out of basic shapes so I can work on the AI pathfinding. I will want the AI to be able to identify flank routes, high-ground positions, and to use mobility skills to cross large distances.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFWeSepglK8

[legomaestro]

Whohoahoa dude that's comprehensive as heck! And haha it's suuper who's legendary at tracking progress more than anything. Programming AI was so exciting to me until I realized I couldn't even make Super Mario AI react well enough to how I intended. Props on you for that.

Must take a lot of effort to do all of this. Respect Kesashi, and keep at it!

[Suuper-san]

when it comes to game making, you definitely need to have a strong method for tracking and evaluating progress, and it looks like you've totally got a solid chart there.
I can't help noticing that each character has their movements sorted separately, does this mean that you have to do extra work to do different walking animations/coding for each character, rather than copying and pasting, or just handling every character with the same code? Because I hope that you can reuse or recycle something otherwise that's a lot of work that is going to be very similar and tedious.

ha.
AI is a pain in the neck, no exceptions. Especially if you're writing one from scratch, and especially when it's more than just a card game AI, controlling movement and deciding how aggressive to make the movements, and control accuracy and so on can be really hard to get balanced.

I watched the video and I loved it.
can't wait to play it

[L.K. [Taikichi]]

I can't help noticing that each character has their movements sorted separately, does this mean that you have to do extra work to do different walking animations/coding for each character, rather than copying and pasting, or just handling every character with the same code? Because I hope that you can reuse or recycle something otherwise that's a lot of work that is going to be very similar and tedious.

AI is a pain in the neck, no exceptions. Especially if you're writing one from scratch, and especially when it's more than just a card game AI, controlling movement and deciding how aggressive to make the movements, and control accuracy and so on can be really hard to get balanced.

So yes by design each character is meant to have very unique animations and in the past I had to make those animations before I could even test them and it slowed me down tremendously. So now each character can share every single animation, so I have been skipping making animations like walking and allowing each character to share a "base walk" animation as well as for jumping. Some characters do have specific animations to match the type of weapon they're using. Just trying to prevent things from looking too strange.

Right now i'm working on introducing a settings menu to increase frame rates for other computers. The performance cost previously was a bit obsurd considering the way characters are textured with the simple flat colors and cel shading it didn't really make much sense for the system requirements to be the same as a realistic game on Ultra.

Lowering the settings here reduced the Graphics Card usage by 75% and you can see the image isn't really too different from its Ultra settings. You can see the maximum settings in the next image. I've also added two more options regarding Damage Numbers and "particle clutter". Damage Numbers I found can really get in the way when there are a lot of them on the screen. They're not a big deal when you're playing a melee character and fighting in close range, but for long ranged heroes like a sniper it can be hard to see targets when the damage numbers are in the way.

Particle Clutter is just a setting that replaces every opaque particle effect with a transparent alternative. It helps for the same reason as disabling damage numbers. Big opaque particles can block information on the screen. It's fine in casual play, but in high stakes situations it becomes a big disadvantage that the AI obviously don't share. Since a lot of things can be happening very quickly it's best if I let you see as much information as possible. If I have an ability like a smoke cloud that's specifically designed to block information, then that will only be affected by this if a teammate uses it, and the AI also won't be able to see through it.

Kor

And lastly one new bit of art. I've got a few more characters to design who may be relevant to the early game in terms of the story.

[Coryn]

OH snap! Screenshots! Nice to see progress on the game as always! Kor is giving some real boss battle energies off...

[Suuper-san]

I imagine working from a base walking animation you can just tweak it a bit and it would work quite well for making the animation suit each character (he says, having no idea on even how to create a walking animation XD). certainly better than creating it from scratch each time. Sounds like a solid plan you've got.

And nice screenshots!
Players won't always have a decent gaming setup (like me lol) so you've always got to plan for the worst case scenario, even if it looks lowish quality someone would rather have a setting where they can actually play the game instead of it crashing or lagging. and it certainly looks pretty much the same with the optimizations, so good job there. Remember to have an explanation for what the settings so otherwise people wont know what it means!

nice character, the cracks on the ground are a great touch, he does indeed give off a menacing vibe :P

[L.K. [Taikichi]]

Now progress in the game demands more artwork. New faces are needed for the story mode. New character added to the game as well. Now the AI can control melee characters pretty well, but I'll need to introduce some new systems in order for them to use ranged heroes effectively.

The Oracle "Uriel" Magnolia


The Mother of the Desert, Laura

[Suuper-san]

great stuff Kesashi!
Just a random thought - it might be nice if the buttons, text and bars had their own backdrop, otherwise it might be hard to read the text and so on against the game background. I don't know what popular with UI these days but that's my initial thought.

[L.K. [Taikichi]]

That's a great idea Suuper.

So you may remember that the people in this world get their power from their clothes. These abilities are defined by the shape, design, color and intricacies of the clothing. So I thought it would be interesting to break down some of the specifics and how things in Blade Regalia end up a little backwards compared to combat gear in reality.

So Color is also relevant to the type of magic they'll be using. And these mechanics aren't necessarily relevant to the game now, but they will be useful for my long term plans to introduce character creation in a later version. So there is a complex engineering aspect to the design and structure of the clothing as well as the layers of clothing that may not be seen on the outside.

Spoiler

[Suuper-san]

wow, really cool concept there.
I love the justifications for high heels and large dresses :P

[Coryn]

My only question here is that the two seem a bit contradictory? If Mana can be quantified volumetrically (as seen with the dress), wouldn't it make more sense to have more contract with the ground by having a flat soled boot? You'd get a lot more surface area that way (not to mention it would be more practical at the same time). The rules should at least be self consistent, otherwise this is just a blatant excuse to draw women in high heels