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dev.log Gold

      I told myself I would never willingly pay money to play Destiny 2, after having been disappointed by the first game, I knew there was no way I was going to pay triple A price for an unfinished game. Now that Destiny 2 has gone free to play on Steam I don’t have to pay money for it though so I see no reason to not play it. It’s not that I don’t want to support Bungie, they were an awesome studio, they made Halo, my favorite series. I just don’t agree with the direction they went with Destiny, it was a project I had a ton of hope for, a whole new universe for Bungie to play around with, whole new stories to tell. Unfortunately this is where they completely lost it, they went ahead trying to make a weird fps MMO looter shooter deal, ultimately foregoing a story. Not that there wasn’t a narrative, Destiny does have a story you can dig into, but you have to dig into it. The saddest thing is, there was a clear effort put into crafting an interesting universe, looking into the story I just wish we would’ve been able to experience and play through it, not just read it in some in game wiki.

      Destiny 2 has the advantage of being the second game in the series so most of the gameplay has been streamlined, most of the kinks have been ironed out. Visually, the game is also fine, it lives up to modern standards and I haven’t run into anything too strange aside from the overpowering bloom effect of explosions. Getting back into the game after having only played the original Destiny very briefly was tough. I had no clue what was going on, what I had to do, or even how to get started. I jumped in blindly and grinded my little heart out for several hours that first night. After getting used to the controls and becoming relatively overpowered I started to have some fun. I realized what Destiny was actually for, forget the story, Destiny is for turning off your brain, turning on some tunes and clicking on a bunch of aliens so you can get more loot to shoot bigger aliens. The gameplay loot is very addictive, shoot for loot and loot so you can shoot, eventually you participate in a raid and get even more loot. You just keep going and going, it’s kind of scary, I didn’t go in expecting to enjoy the game as much as I do.

      I jokingly brought up my battleship clone to one of my friends, to my surprise he actually seemed pretty interested in trying to help remix the formula of battleship. We’ve been shooting ideas back and forth for a while now, there have definitely been some crazy suggestions, 3D, multiplayer, planes, etc. The hope is that we eventually come up with something we could feasibly throw together in Unity, he’ll be doing the programming, I’ll be doing the art. I don’t want to go too in depth describing away the whole game just in case we move forward with this project, hopefully we can get this thing off the ground and see where it goes. The ultimate goal is to eventually have a free game published on Steam.

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dev.log Silver

      Battleship was a success. My not Battleship, Battleship style game was completed on time. I had a good time developing all the little tweaks so I could hopefully see people use them strategically. Unfortunately, as I saw during my first play test, the rules were a bit too vague players weren’t really sure how to use their abilities, or when to use them. When they managed to use them correctly, they worked as intended, for the most part. In one of my feedback forms I got a pretty solid suggestion. Due to the Interceptors movement ability, it’s possible to move it onto a space that has already been hit, rendering it essentially invisible. This is super broken and not at all what I had planned. Thankfully no one did this as it would have ruined the whole play test, I’m just glad it was pointed out.

       I think the highlight of the play test was when one of the players thought that a scan automatically rewarded you with hits on targets within the scan. They called out some coordinates and it turned out there were two units in the scan, they then called every hit and destroyed two units in one scan. This is not at all how it was intended to work, it was definitely interesting seeing other people’s misinterpretation of the rules. In the revised rule sheet I would definitely include some figures and gameplay examples on the side columns, along with some more in depth descriptions of mechanics and possible interactions.

      Since Battleship takes forever to play I only got two groups to play the game. One of which I observed and took notes on. The first game took about thirty minutes, I have no clue how long the other game lasted they just wrote “Yes” in the minutes spot. In total I only got four feedback sheets, in a perfect world I would’ve gotten like twenty. It’s hard to gauge opinions with such a small sample size, even then I think I still got some decent feedback.

      I only played one new game this week, I bought a couple of games on the Nintendo E shop (I had a bunch of credits from past purchases). I tried picking games with styles similar to the kind of game I want to make, including but not limited to, pixel art, metroidvania, platformer, a mix of all three. I only got to play one of them, it’s a fighting game called “One Strike” and as the name might imply, fights only take one strike. Every move is one hit kill, this makes the game pretty intense, you have to try to predict what your enemy is going to do and pick the right option. One mistake means you lose the match, which in turn turns the game into a sweat match. I think it’s best described as a run on sentence, one of those where you catch your breath at the end, you’re sitting there clutching half a joy-con going seventy on the freeway in the back seat of your friend’s car looking a tiny screen trying to see how many pixels are between you and the other guy because you don’t want to whiff the one chance you have at touching their chest with the tip of your sword. 

      Aside from the sweaty gameplay though, I really do appreciate this game’s simplicity. Simple pixel art style, almost like an Atari game. It’s set in feudal Japan, so obviously one of the characters is a guy in a paddy hat and kimono with a Katana. Other characters include huge demon with club, old man with one of those small katanas, kimono lady with knife, ninja with sai, and overpowered mace guy.

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dev.log Bronze

      I spent the entire week developing and working on a remix of battleship. By far my favorite part was analyzing how battleship actually works and the different strategies you can apply to the gameplay. I read an excellent article on the statistics of different strategies on datagenetics.com, which I’ll link at the end of my post.

      About 99% of the a game that is just random shooting takes around 78 shots to complete. Humans can’t think truly randomly though, most people shoot search around the board until they get a hit and then work around that, left, up, down, right, to hit the rest of the ship. Using this strategy, “Hunt and Target”, games last about 65 shots which is slightly better than random. You can then improve on this Hunt aspect of this strategy by narrowing your results with “Parity.” By thinking of the field as a checker board you can narrow your possible targets down to 50 instead of 100 spots. This helps a little more, making it possible to complete a game in 60 shots.

      To get an even more efficient searching algorithm you have to work with the information you are given. Since when a ship is sunk your opponent has to tell you which ship it was “You sunk my destroyer,” you can now know your new minimum ship size is 3. Once the aircraft carrier has been sunk your new maximum size is four. You can use this information to try and figure out where a certain ship is more likely to be. The key to this is to find the destroyer early on as it is the easiest ship to hide as it occupies 2 spots. When you’re in hunt mode you only have to worry about “unvisited,” misses and sunk ships spaces. Treat misses and sunk ships, “obstructions that potential ships need to be placed around.” When in target mode (when you have at least one hit ship that hasn’t been sunk) then hit squares are treated as “unvisited space squares” and you use this to decide if a ship could pass through that given area, you then apply a heavy weight to potential locations that pass through a point that already has a hit. Using this method games take an average of 42 shots to complete, much better than before.

      After seeing all the numbers and seeing an effective algorithm at work, I was blown away at how interesting Battleship is. For its simplicity, the mechanics can become surprisingly complex when you pick them apart. My goal with my board game was to introduce some new mechanics to make the gameplay a little more faster paced. I made the board larger, 15x15, there are now 225 possible locations. There are also 31 possible locations (2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 4, 5). So the game went from being 17-100 to 31-225, I wanted the gameplay to be faster but the length of the game to feel about the same as regular battleship.

      I added an extra phase to the gameplay, a special action phase. Certain units have actions they can perform as long they are active on the field. The Comms Array (4 squares) can scan an area of three on the board, your opponent then tells you how many potential shots are in that area. You can do this twice per array, making it better if both your arrays are still in play. If you only have 1 left you can only do this twice even if you hadn’t done it before. The next of ability of the Comms Array is to call for M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction) Here’s how it works:

      -Opp: “B9“ “C10“ (Calls their shots)

      -You: “Miss and Miss“ (Not having any units there you call miss twice)

      -You: “MAD B9, C10“ “J10“ “J9“ (You fire at the same coordinates as your opponent, and then you call your two coordinates as well)

      -Opp:  “Miss“ “Miss” “Miss” “Hit” (The MAD shots miss but another did not)

      -Opp: “MAD J10″ “E13“ “H9“ (Opponent can only call for one shot during MAD and then makes their own two shots)

As you can see there are times where you can make a maximum of four shots in a turn. It is also possible, if both shots are hits to be able to only have a minimum of two shots in a turn.

http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/december32011/

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dev.log Violet

      My switch finally got back from being repaired, I sent it in like a month ago. They charged me one hundred and some change for the repairs and wiped all the save data on my SD card. All in all, not worth it. On the bright side, I did get to buy a game I’ve wanted to play and it was on sale too. Being able to play games while laying in bed has kind of revived my will to play video games again.

      Anyways, Blasphemous is a metroidvania style game that takes heavy inspiration from Dark Souls. I really like the art in this game, that’s what drew me in to begin with, there’s something about fluid pixel animation that just does it for me. I wouldn’t say this game is for the feint of heart though, it’s a lot more gory than I thought it would be. Usually, the gore is implied in souls games, they’re surprisingly tame in this regard, aiming more to unsettle than to gross out. Blasphemous doesn’t really care about your sensibilities though, naked enemies and dismemberment are the norm in this game, one of the main game bosses is a half-rotted half-melted floating head with a surprising amount of detail for a pixel art game. Needless to say, I didn’t go into this game expecting any of this, at most I expected the typical zombie-like enemy or some large gross looking boss monster, but I feel like the shock of seeing these things really helped the overall experience. It made the world all the more confusing and scary. It also made me want to find out what made the world of Blasphemous this way, it’s implied that things weren’t always like this, your goal in the game is to fix things, or at least make things better for the inhabitants of this world by performing some vague ritual, as is the norm in souls like games.

      The gameplay is pretty solid, the combat is nice. Hitting enemies feels right, sometimes games don’t do this part right and it can ruin the whole experience. When The Penitent One (the player character) swings his sword the motion feels good, he’s agile but tired, you can feel the weight behind his swings, like every strike is a desperate last attempt at defense. The jumps feel heavy, you can take off in the air, but fall too far and you’ll land with a solid crunch. Despite this, you still retain enough control in the air to make it a viable form of dodging during combat. Speaking of dodging, no souls-like game would be complete without a dodge, The Penitent One slides forward, purple silhouttes trail behind him implying the swiftness of this motion, but also highlighting the frames where you’re invincible during the animation. Dodging in this game is important, it’s one of the best ways to avoid being hit and losing health (obviously), but there is a more offensive option. If you’re up to it, you can try to parry pretty much every physical attack in the game, this gives you an opportunity to retaliate while the enemy is stunned. Sometimes, after a powerful attack or parry you’ll get the option to perform an execution, this lets you instantly kill the enemy no matter how much health they have left and it fills your fervor bar (basically a magic meter) very quickly.

      I do like the platforming in this game quite a bit, having to wedge your sword into the wall to wall jump is pretty cool, it also makes the wall jumps a little more calculated and weighty. You can just hang on a wall, waiting to make your next move, unless of course something is trying to hit you, which is the case most of the time. My only gripe with the game are some of my platforming related deaths, of course most of my platforming related deaths can be chalked up to sloppy inputs and impatience. However, I don’t think falling off a cliff should instantly kill me every single time, I understand this mechanic in a 3D game, but in a platformer the least you could do is take half of my health bar so I at least get a second chance. You don’t lose too much upon death so it’s not really that bad, the worst thing is the damage it does to your morale. Having to trek up the same mountain twenty times only to get slapped by the same guy twenty times and fall off the same ledge twenty times. It really gets to you. Like I said though, this is mostly my own fault for getting slapped so many times. 

      While I haven’t finished the game yet, I’m pretty darn close, like eighty percent or something. I feel like I’ve gotten a good enough feel for the game that I could make a solid review for it. Like I’ve experienced everything the game has to offer (mechanically and aesthetically speaking) and I feel really inspired by this game as a whole. It’s crazy that someone pretty much made exactly the kind of game I’ve been dreaming of making for a while. A metroidvania style game with the visual aesthetics of Dark Souls, weighty combat and platforming, an interesting yet vague story told mostly through its environment, and some really somber and melancholy music to top it all off. Clearly it’s possible if someone else made it happen, now I’m just going to have to pull it together and give it a shot.

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dev.log Indigo

      I didn’t get any feedback forms, not that I’m surprised seeing how I didn’t have a game to get feedback from. That’s okay though, I was still able to participate and give feedback. I played some pretty interesting card games, the one I remember enjoying the most was this math card game, the objective was to create a working equation out of the cards in your hand. Multiplication and division were worth 2 points addition and subtraction were worth one. Admittedly it was tough to do math, even simple stuff like that, early in the morning, but it was engaging enough that I didn’t mind thinking harder than usual.        There was also this other game about defending your castle that was pretty fun too, I don’t think we played it right though, it was a four player game and I only played it with one other person. The rules were a little vague, but in retrospect I think it might’ve been the other two people we were missing that made the game a little more confusing to play. The game revolved around attack and defense phases, kind of like other 1 v 1 dueling card games. If your card had a higher value than the opponents your attack/defense would be successful. The face cards were used as life points, you lose when all your face cards are gone. I wish I could’ve played a full game of this with all players required, it seemed interesting.       There were a ton of card games, I only got to play three, two of them I remember, the other didn’t really make too much of an impression. Just the sheer amount of variety in the games I saw though, there were over thirty different games, that’s more card games than I knew existed. If all of them were 100% original that’s absolutely incredible, more than likely some of these games took inspiration from existing games, like the castle defense game. There’s nothing wrong with that though, innovating on an existing formula is probably the best way to come up with something that works. I don’t think there is a such thing as a 100% original idea, you have to draw from experiences to create something, nothing is created in a vacuum and whether you like it or not you will be drawing influence from somewhere to create something.       Speaking of which, I’ve been looking at a lot of pixel art lately. My friend really wants me to make him a pixel art music video, I figured why not. It’ll be an easy way for me to get started making sprites and animating, and I could definitely use the practice. I went ahead and converted my concept sketches into sprites, I think they look alright. Hopefully I’ll be able to get the walk cycles done soon, I’ve already finished the idle animations (the easiest bit). I definitely think the hardest part is going to be creating environments, I’m not sure a hand drawn environment would mesh well with pixel art sprites, but I’m not completely opposed to the idea.       For the music video I needed to make a beach environment, this was a great chance for me to make some nice warm gradients for the sunset background. As it turns out, you can make some pretty solid looking gradients in pixel art, which is great news since most of my actual game is going to consist of warm sunset and cool night settings. If I do decide to go for an all pixel art look I know I can at least pull it of decently well. One thing I’m not to sure about is perspective, I’m not very good at it to begin with, but in pixel art it’s even tougher, you’re working with so little that you really have to leave perspective up to viewer interpretation and I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.

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dev.log Blue

      The last two weeks have been nightmarish. I’ve never felt so sapped before, like completely out of energy. All I can do is lay in bed in my dark room and try to get rest, but I just can’t fall asleep either. It seems like the only time I can sleep is when it’s inconvenient to me, I slept through multiple alarms and classes last week, somehow I was able to crawl out of my room for a test on Monday. I just can’t find the motivation to do anything anymore. I feel terrible, I don’t even enjoy drawing, video games, music, food, nothing. The only thing keeping me going is my friends. I don’t really leave the dorm much so I’ve been spending a lot of time with my roommates. One of them wants me to make a music video for him, he wants it done in a pixel art atari-esque style. I took him up on the offer, it seems like a good excuse to work on some pixel art/ animation. I don’t have the heart to tell him that it might never be done.       I’m not sure if I’m actually depressed or just in a rut, either way it has given me a bit of inspiration. My game is going to be about depression, sure from the outside it’s going to look like dark souls fan art, but deep down I want my game to be something meaningful and fun to play. How can depression be fun? It can’t be, however, I thought something interesting while I was on the balcony taking a cigarette break. It’s super hard to get through it alone, the whole time you feel like you want to give up, things are beating you down left and right and it all feels pointless. However, you can learn, adapt, bring a friend even, and maybe it’ll become just easy enough for you to scrape by and move on to the next impossible obstacle where you can do it all again. That’s essentially how a souls game works, you lose over and over just for that brief moment where you savor your victory over whatever boss you just defeated.

      I’m really starting to feel like hand drawing a whole game was a huge mistake. I hate the way my art looks, I’m terrible with perspective so I haven’t been able to get any environments done. I feel like I need to change my art style, but to what? I can’t really draw in the semi-realistic art style I was originally going for, but I feel like it’s the style that would suit the game I want to make. I might have to tone down the realism for a more, not cartoony, maybe gross is the word. It’s just been hard for me to break out of my de-motivational cycle long enough to get any actual work done. I have to though, otherwise I’m just throwing away money I don’t have by missing assignment after assignment. I might even fail my classes at this rate, there’s a group project due today and I’m sitting here alone with nothing to show. That’s another 80 points I won’t be getting.      

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dev.log Teal

I couldn’t post anything. I tried typing something up but scrapped the whole thing and started over, just to end up trashing the whole thing and missing the midnight deadline.

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dev.log Green

      This week I finally got to play some of Dark Souls 2. Despite my love for the first and third games in this series, I had never gotten the chance to actually start playing the game, it just kind of sat in my library. Interestingly this game functions a little differently than the other two souls games, most of your healing is going to be done using life gems. Unlike the usual estus which heals chunks of health instantly, life gems heal small amounts over time, it is still very possible to get hit and lose out on some of that healing and due to the limited amount of estus you’ll likely have to depend on that health.       Admittedly I didn’t play much of the actual game, I spent most of my time in Heide’s Tower of Flame, a location just outside of the main hub. I came across this location after playing a small chunk of the early game, I just got fixated on that weird puzzle area right out of the hub, who wouldn’t. When I finally got there I pretty much immediately realized it would be no joke, it was full of enemies. Thankfully, two of the Heide Knights are just resting on the ground passively (a warning of things to come).

      The only challenge ends up being timing dodges past the Old Knights (typical big slow enemies) attacks and dealing damage in the small windows between attack loops. If you’re patient, you can learn their patterns quickly, even the different variations, great-sword, mace, sword and shield, no matter who they all highly telegraph their moves. However, if you’re greedy they will punish you and for a lot of damage if you’re early game like me. There is one thing though, Heide Knights are pretty bad. The couple you see at the entrance are docile, the next you see is absolutely bloodthirsty. At least for me, maybe I’m just bad but these guys are crazy, just when I thought I had their attack patterns down they retaliate with some crazy counter attack I never see coming. Also, they love stringing combos on you, which when paired with a Old Knight from before makes for a surefire way to get one shot by a two v.s. one combo.         That being said, I love the area of Heide’s Tower, the massive cathedral and what seems to be a lighthouse are connected by perilously thin stone pathways above a black churning ocean. The white stone of the structures is accented with blue tiling on the roofs, most notably the large blue domes on some of the buildings. Typical of large castles in the souls series there are tiny little bridges connecting some of the towers here, which you can use to traverse the area. The skybox here also does a great job making this area stand out it’s this wonderful mix of somber blue hues with a pale sunset off in the distance over an endless black sea, this comes as a stark contrast yo Majula’s warm red sunset skybox and even crazier contrast to the dark tower puzzle you traverse to get there.          There’s just something about the look of the Flame Tower area I love, it’s got this calm atmosphere to it, but it also commands this kind of air of respect to it. Apparently it’s the path to join one of the game’s factions, whether it’s worth it I’m not sure, but I’ll enjoy exploring the area regardless. It almost makes me want to do something similar in my game, make some kind of homage to this cool area. I imagine it would be hard to do it justice without appearing like a cheap rip off.

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dev.log Yellow

      Another grueling week of trying to come up with really cool ideas for my game, it makes me feel like I’m overthinking this whole thing. I’m starting to think that maybe the best plan of action is to keep the whole brainstorming thing to a minimum and actually start working with what I have. I can’t just be stuck in a never ending brainstorming phase, maybe it’s time to stop thinking and start doing - doing what though I’m not really sure.       The next step going forward should definitely be working on some kind of in game environment or work on finalizing my main player character. I don’t think I could feasibly make a character customization system just yet, I just don’t trust my own programming knowledge. Realistically, I’ll probably just clean up the sketches I already have. I have to come to a decision on the art-style of my game. I was thinking of making it like a living sketchbook, animate my sketches, which could be cool. I kind of like the grain of paper and seeing a whole paper world animated would be pretty cool, also it’d give me an excuse to fill up my sketchbook.

      It will definitely be a massive undertaking to fully animate a game on paper though, to best tackle this I’ll definitely just start off sketching some sprite sheets. It’ll definitely make my job easier when the time comes to actually implement them if they’re already mocked up as GIFs or something in Photoshop.

      Animating environments is going to be the most difficult for sure, I’m not even sure where to start doing something like that. I imagine it’s like making a sprite sheet but for a whole environment, but that sounds ridiculous. Maybe creating a bunch of animated assets and putting them in the environments could liven everything up a bit, then again I would like for everything to be wholly unique. My dream would be to create a world where the player never sees the same asset more than once, unless they’re revisiting the same area. I’m not sure if something like this is doable in one lifetime but I’d like to try.

      I’ve only seen one other game do this kind of thing, and that was a collaboration between of a bunch of high school art students. It’s killing me that I can’t remember the name of this game, everything was beautifully drawn and painted, it had this really cool Japanese aesthetic and the water colored paper look fit it perfectly. There are other hand drawn games notably Cuphead, Hollowknight, Skullgirls and The Banner Saga, but none of them really match what I’m talking about. 

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dev.log Orange

I have this idea of the perfect game, it’s a metroidvania, it’s atmospheric and dark, and it tells it’s story through minimal dialogue with a focus on environmental storytelling. I’m pretty sure this is just Hollowknight, it’s my favorite game after all, but I would like to be able to create a game like this with the crazy fantastic Gothic visuals I love so much, but world-building is super hard and very easy to get lost in. Lately it feels like I’ve been spending less time playing games and more time thinking about them. Like coming up with little ideas here and there, I never really write them down. Also, I find myself analyzing the games I play more often, thinking about different mechanics and their implementations. Sometimes I start thinking about how big of an undertaking it is to create a video game. It’ll never get done if I don’t actually start collecting my thoughts somewhere, scribbles, notes whatever it might be I have to start collecting content. This week I purchased Gato Roboto, another addition in my quest to play every single Metroid style game. It is as the name implies, about a cat in a robot suit, which is a welcome change from the usual human in a robot suit thing. I really like what this game does with it’s abilities, your movement is really only limited by your own mastery of the controls and abilities. Using rockets to extend your jump and bouncing off of enemies you can string together some pretty crazy movement chains, I imagine. I’m not very good at the game yet, I’ve only put two hours into it so far.

The boss fights in this game are pretty solid too, they definitely test your skill with the sticks. I feel like the boss fights are more about controlling your own movement than it is about doing damage to the boss. The fights turn into a dance, you start flowing, taking shots when you can. It’s great really, I really like when a game rewards you for being able to learn on the fly and adapt.

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dev.log Red

I drew up some sketches for environments in my game. Nothing super detailed, they’re all pretty rough and are going to need a lot more work if they’re going to become anything more than concepts. Creating a whole world is tough, it’s crazy to look into worlds other people have created. Some of them are so fleshed you can lose yourself for hours in the intricate and sometimes super ridiculous level of detail some devs go into. I’d like to be like that but I don’t think my brain could handle something like that, it might take me a lifetime to do something on the level of Hidetaka Miyazaki.

This week I played a game I had been meaning to play for a while now. Now that I have a reason to play new games I’ve been using it as an excuse to get through my wish-list. Anyways, today I played Dead Cells, I feel like they named the game that on purpose, it sounds a little too much like Dark Souls to be a coincidence. The premise of the game is similar, you’re undead, you fight other undead and sometimes you have to fight a boss. The underlying narrative is pretty souls-like too, it’s no doubt the devs took heavy inspiration from the souls games.

That’s where the similarities stop however. The gameplay is an entirely different beast. Dead Cells is a 2D platformer, dungeon-crawler, hack-&-slash-nightmare. It’s a simple game at it’s core; every area is randomly generated, so you can never memorize the exact path to the exit door. This element of randomness makes things pretty interesting, loot will never spawn in the same places, enemies, bonus areas; everything is randomly generated, which allows you to explore the same area indefinitely without ever getting the same exact experience. Which is something I appreciate because every play through of Dead Cells is essentially an endless no death play through. What I mean is, if you die you start over from the beginning of the game. You get to keep the progress you’ve made though, blueprints, upgrades, and weapons will remain unlocked.

Dead Cells is about speed, everything about this game wants you to play it fast, you even get a buff if you chain your actions together smoothly, you run and perform every action faster. In between levels you get rewards for completing an area under a set time limit.

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dev.log Magenta

This past week has been interesting in terms of my work as a game designer. I wrote a basic game narrative, although I still don’t know what kind of game I would apply it to. I never really realized how hard it is to come up with something truly original, if you get really critical everything starts to seem derivative. I guess the only way to create something truly unique is to combine a bunch of elements from a bunch of different things. What if you made x game in y genre, that kind of thing works to a certain extent. For my game I’ve never played I’m choosing Sekrio: Shadows die Twice, for a multitude of reasons; I’m taking Japanese and the game is in Japanese, it’s a From Software and I like their games, and a friend of mine has urged me to try it out. Coming fresh off of From’s previous titles, I was prepared to die in Sekrio. This game is much faster paced than the games of the Souls series, which I was not ready for. From also manage to implement something I never thought I’d see in one of their games, the y-axis. You can use Sekiro’s crazy wooden arm to grapple on terrain, obviously this adds entirely new ways to die into the game. It also allowed From to make some pretty crazy and interesting terrain for the fantasy/feudal-Japanese world the game takes place in. This game looks like a every other From game

Being a ninja, stealth plays a big part in this game, if you sneak around sometimes you can take out most of the enemies in an area without too much commotion, you could also just run right past them straight into the boss arena. Boss fights in Sekiro aren’t the striking once and rolling away that I’m familiar, It’s more like a dance of blades, like a sword rhythm game where losing means you die (twice). Most of the boss battles consist of learning the opponents move-set and finding an opportunity do damage, the real challenge comes when you have have to parry incoming attacks. If you mess up you’ll get hit, you might even die, if you succeed you get the chance to riposte. Most bosses have to be riposted and executed, if you don’t finish them in this way they’ll regain 25% of their health back and continue to fight until one of you dies.

Speaking of dying, in this game you get to do it twice; that is when you die, you can resurrect and continue fighting, dying again means you lose half your money and progress toward your next skill. There are more consequences to dying a true death, when you die a little too much there is a chance that an NPC in your world will be infected with ‘Dragonrot‘ which means you may lose valuable quest lines.