Creating a control scheme that works well in its default state is something we’ve been tickling and fiddling since the we started the game back in late 2016 and it’s something we’ll tweak until it’s perfect. It’s incredibly important to us and more so to you as a player that the controls feel tight and intuitive. We don’t want any “I PRESSED ATTACK, DUMB GAME!” moments, even though that’s always my excuse when staring at a death screen in any game I play.
This leads us on to Input buffers, which are super important too. If you don’t know what an input buffer is, it’s basically a way of the game storing your button press and performing the action as soon as it is free to do so. Imagine pressing jump as soon as you hit the ground to avoid danger but your character doesn’t jump because he was 1 pixel away from the ground (you couldn’t possible see/react quick enough). Whoops, your fault. In fact no, our fault for being bad game designers and not including input buffers. So yeah, input buffers are in and prevent this. It works for attacks and anything else too to give a much smoother user experience!
Forward tuck round-off front flip handspring straddle to axe smash. 10 points.
We have moved weapon switching to 1 button (RB) as opposed to 2 (LB + RB) as we really don’t feel the need to have 2 buttons to cycle through 3 weapons. It was a cool idea to always be only one button press away from your desired weapon but with the inclusion of weapon swap input buffering we feel taking out LB to switch back to the last weapon is the right thing to do, plus frees up that button for switching arrows, hooray!
Arrows
A lot of progress has been made with the bow & arrow mechanics and we’re really happy on how it’s turning out. Still a little ways to go with it but we’ve worked hard on the 4 different special arrows you can acquire on your in-game travels.
Now in 4 tasty new flavours!
How they affect enemies is something we want you guys to experiment with so we don’t want to spoil too much, however, there are a few gifs and that floating around on our twitter if you want to dig around! One thing to keep in mind is that the bow and ranged attacking should feel secondary to melee/close combat. It’s definitely a balancing act for us to make sure this is the case with our recent decision to give Flynn infinite special arrows once acquired, but we’ll keep tweaking until we’re 100% happy with them. Our main goal is to give players many ways to tackle groups of enemies and these special arrows really do give the ability to do just that.
New Health System
This is a big one for us and we’re hopeful this change will be one of our best changes yet. Originally we had a common health bar that simply worked as, well, a common health bar. We have now realized that we don’t need a bar without the inclusion of damage numbers and wildly varying damage upon the player. Our new health bar represents damage loss and health gain much more clearly.
Crystal clear! (Hah, Get it?)
But that’s not all! Our next huge change is the inclusion of a way to acquire healing orbs that doesn’t just link to checkpoints. Killing enemies will now add to our newly added healing orb bar which, when full, grants you an orb (providing you’re not already full). Not only will this be good for players to collect and feel a bit more in control of their health but we’re hoping this will incentivize even more combat engagements. Low on healing orbs before a boss? Go ahead and grind out that enemy spawner, We’re not stopping you!
Sounds
New sounds are being designed and tested currently with all of Flynn’s attacks and abilities. We really want to give the player an overall enjoyable experience and that means sound design too. Check out this short video to get a taste of our new SFX so far.
General tweaks and QoL stuff
We’re never going to stop tweaking and fiddling with this stuff until it’s 110% perfect, as we’ve mentioned before, our philosophy is “game feel comes first”. Here’s one very important change that adds a lot of control to the game, especially since jumping is a very common thing in game!
Left: New Right: Old
As you can see, we’ve added a small hang-time to Flynn before gravity kicks in if you hold down the jump button.
Anything else?
Why, yes! We have been busy with a lot of enemy design, environmental tweaks and general gameplay but we don’t want to show everything we’ve done else there’d be nothing to look forward to, right?
Last chance shirt pre-orders + The Hollow!
about 6 years ago
– Tue, Feb 13, 2018 at 12:06:25 AM
Hello again to all our beautiful Crimson children, we hope winter has been treating you well!
T-shirts
A quick note before we jump into the update. If you or anyone you know would like a Kickstarter Flynn t-shirt, we will be shutting down the pre-orders at the end of the week as we start production to get them on your beautiful bodies. Get your orders in here before it's closed! - https://flynn-son-of-crimson.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
The Hollow
We recently moved over from Mistral Peak to working on The Hollow! We're happy with the current state of ice land, now on to watery land. Here's a taste of some wet gameplay!
The boy swims
Now with a re-worked BG by Phil, and a lot of environmental animations by Hunter!
The Hollow's caverns have received a lot of love lately, as we work on unique mechanics (most are secret ssshhh). Of course featuring everyone's favorite grumpy crabs.
Isle action!
We're very happy with our progress and just wanted to show you all a little bit of what is stored in the Thunderhorse vault. Apart from the Isles, we're working hard as always to make gameplay as fun as possible, with more bow improvements and adding more functions to the big special attacks we showed off some time ago. Keep those eyes peeled (ew) for a future update on that!
Wait he forgot how to swim again
Here's another look into the first pass on cut scenes (ignore any weird GIF issues!) our concept boi Jaya has been working hard on! See you in next month's update!
Welcoming Flynn to 2018!
over 6 years ago
– Wed, Jan 10, 2018 at 12:18:19 AM
Hello all you beautiful Crimson babes. Hope you all had a lovely holiday and new year!
Over the last couple of months we have been getting deep into stage mechanics and level design as well as tweaking a lot of the core mechanics of Flynn himself. Collectively we’ve watched most of the let’s play videos of the demo that are sprinkled on Youtube and listened to every bit of feedback regarding gameplay, art and music that you guys have sent to us via other sources and we’re extremely happy on how things are turning out.
Adding things like better bow movements and enabling more weapon abilities as you guys have suggested is really helping the game feel more alive and dynamic. A lot of the things you guys suggested and harped on are in the works and we’re sure you’ll love what we have in store.
We’re currently working on Mistral Peak (The first main area) which is coming together very nicely and we’re slowly introducing the game’s core mechanics through level design. Hopefully this will teach you how the game is played without any written tutorials and/or hand-holding as we’re firm believers that the game should teach you through playing and figuring things out with cues straight from gameplay.
Beta tester surveys have been sent out, and you all shouldn’t have to wait too much longer as we have got a nice big chunk of gameplay almost ready to pull out of the crimson oven! There are just a few more bits and pieces to put together and we’ll have something hot and fresh for you guys to play and send us feedback.
Alongside all this we have been working with our favorite concept artist Jaya on some in-game cut scene mock ups. Very excited with how they are turning out, here's a taste!
See you in the next update soon!
Late backing pre-orders!
over 6 years ago
– Fri, Nov 10, 2017 at 11:07:21 PM
Late Backing
Surveys via Backerkit were sent out this week for backers, but along with that comes late backing pre-orders! Available are the physical items from the campaign, as well as the game, OST, and digital art book. These won't be available for too long, so if you're looking to get any extras or were waiting for Paypal backing, now is the time! Physical rewards likely won't be made available again when the time is up!
We've continued development smoothly since the campaign wrapped up, jumping over to filling out Mistral Peak. Things will be a little quiet on our end for a bit, but we will be sharing a lot soon! For now, meet Loretta!
Loretta is an old war veteran residing in the village of Sanctia. Throughout the game, she will take Flynn under her wing and teach him new combat techniques, allowing him to enter his mind and train in a safe space.
Closed beta backers
We will be getting in contact with all of the beta backers some time soon for the discord invite. Don't worry, we're just digging our faces back in to the development for now so we can have some goodies for you to test later!
What's Next + Late Backing!
over 6 years ago
– Sat, Oct 28, 2017 at 01:52:03 AM
What’s next?
Now that our post-Kickstarter happy-heads have finally settled down from all the excitement, it’s time for us to start on the meat and potatoes of the game. We couldn’t be happier with the general reception that the Kickstarter and demo got. Motivation is through the roof right now for everyone on the team; so let’s do this!
Also, we have already been listening to your feedback by watching as many of the video playthroughs as we could, and have applied a bunch of tweaks to smooth out certain aspects of gameplay. We’ll also be active on this front throughout the beta phase once we arrive at that point, so those of you who are part of the beta access can help join in with testing new things!
Speaking of Beta, we're setting up a grouping of private discord channels on our public server at the moment for the closed beta backers. But don’t fret, if you want to get in on the Discord fun but are not a beta tier contributor, you can join the public server here.
Late Backing
We're still working on it, but late backing will be coming soon enough via BackerKit! From there, backers will be able to upgrade their pledges, pick add-ons, and any non-backer can pre-order individual select items (all physical items for a very limited time). We'll keep everyone updated on that!
