Hellish Quart
Update: Arcade Mode and the Boss Fight
In the arcade mode, you will fight a series of duels that end in a boss fight. The character's backstories are, for the moment, in a form of text panels that provide just the basic info about each fencer's motivations. Later in the production, we will replace the panels with proper cutscenes. The already existing cutscenes you will see in the arcade boss fight are made especially to be universal enough to work regardless of which character the boss is fighting with.
The game's boss is designed to be a final exam for your fighting skills. Good luck!
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Hellish Quart pre-alpha v.2023.01.08.0
TWEAK:
- Fencers' starting positions moved back by 0.5m each, so there's actually a free 4m area between fencers, instead of them spawning 4m from each other. This may feel too far in comparison to other fighting games, but it's a "real world" customary distance in fencing, which should prevent "sucker punching" with long range attacks.
- Gedeon: Tweaks of attack canceling timings for more responsive blocks
- Meadow arena: slightly less yellow postprocessing
- All characters: tweaks of the next attack input delay after your previous attack was blocked (mostly longer). This is not a typical "minus on block", because you still can block incoming attacks, you just can't instantly repeat the attack after the first one got blocked. This can break combos, but doesn't apply to combos that were executed before impact. This is consistent with real world fencing, where the riposte is usually faster than repeating an attack.
- All characters: AI tweaks (work in progress...)
- Samuel: Attack animation tweaks for better parry-riposte exchanges
- Samuel: Better attack animations in far-close range dynamic blending
- Game Speed slider value in Gameplay Options no longer saves, it resets to 1.0x speed on every game restart
- Hit reactions from Close Attacks (punches etc.) can now also be canceled by dodging back
- Isabella: increased muscle strength for more accurate sword attack trajectories
- Isabella: you can now cancel a linked attack in mid-combo
- Isabella: way shorter recovery from attacks after impact (the cooldown for the next attack still applies, but she can block way faster after impact)
- Alexander: basic cutting attacks slower canceling on whiffs
- Alexander: a bit slower guard animations (by 0.03s)
- Marta: slower Close Attack animation and slower rate of repeating it
- Isabella: her thrusts are now blocked only if the blade contact was at the top of her blade
- Isabella: better aiming when thrusting
- Isabella: her sword loses momentum on block way faster now
- Barabasz: damage cap on the next attacks in a combo is a bit higher
- Marta: Pressing "Push" again after a push will no longer trigger the follow-up attack, only pressing a proper attack button will do this
- Alexander: his blade can now be bashed through by heavier blades if hit at the weak part (top)
- Isabella: different Hit reaction animations
- Removed the mechanic of reducing the damage on every next attack in a combo sequence or in linked attacks. Although it seemed a good idea on paper, it was not "readable" for players and seemed like a bug.
- Jacek: thrust attacks now have some additional aim
- Damage adjustment for thrusts in the game (generally lower, especially for sabers)
- Generally longer recovery from thrust attacks for heavy weapons
- Barabasz: Damage buff
- Kalkstein: his damage is now way less dependent on weapon velocity to ensure more consistent damage outcomes
- Kalkstein: his sword tip detector should now detect Hitboxes even if it is already stuck inside one (for example because of physics simulation)
- Kalkstein: different Fwd, Y, Y combo
- Jacek: more physics muscle power for more accurate blade trajectories
FIX:
- Switched to a different physics solver in hopes to improve overall physics accuracy and limit impossible to solve scenarios
- Greatly increased the physics solving iterations per frame to try to get rid of the unsolvable collision scenarios which sometimes resulted in the "sticky" swords effect
- Lowered down the maximum angular velocity of all swords to try to get rid of the unsolvable collision scenarios which sometimes resulted in the "sticky" swords effect
- AI: Fixed a bug where some characters were not respecting the next attack delay after being blocked
- Gedeon: fixed a bug where thrusts were recognized as cuts and could bash through the weak part of the opponent's blade
- Laszlo: fixed a bug where a low thrust was recognized as a cut (had unreasonable damage, non-bindable)
- All characters should now be able to correctly dodge back to cancel Hit reactions
- Kalkstein: fixed a bug where he bashed through opponents' blades too often- Isabella: fixed a bug where her hair could pull her head with physics
- Isabella: fixed dropping sword twitching
NEW:
- Arcade mode (WIP)
- Arcade Bossfight (a bit different than will be in the Story mode)
- Arcade Bossfight cutscenes (WIP - placeholder voiceovers)
Hotfix 2022.12.09.0
- Isabella: Fixed a bug where her visual representation of the sword was "floating", so the rendered sword model was not exactly where it really was according to physics. This bug did not change the outcome of the fight, but often it looked like the sword missed, where it actually hit.
- Samuel: fixed a bug with incorrect attack triggering after a Push
- Samuel: Fixed the flesh penetration distance on thrust
- Fixed some IK issues when blades penetrate the body on thrust in general
TWEAK:
- Castle arena: The camera doesn't zoom out as far at the end of a fight to avoid going into environment geometry
Hotfix 2022.12.04.0
- fixed IK of swords piercing the body parts when thrusting
Update 2022.11.30.0 (New fencer: Samuel)
We decided to divide the upcoming Arcade mode update into two parts. We need a bit more time to make a great boss fight, so we are releasing a new playable character right now, and the arcade mode will come soon after. The boss fight will require AI refactoring, hence the increased amount of work is still needed. I hope the other fighters will benefit from that too!
Enjoy! :)
NEW:
- New character: Samuel
- New Arena: Wooden Castle
FIX:
- Various small fixes
What to expect in next updates
This will include a new character (playable, but in a non-boss form for now) with a whole new animation set, a specific AI for the boss, a boss arena, and - since we now will have the main villain - a classic arcade mode. The arcade mode of course is not replacing the main cinematic story but is just an additional mode, that you can play through with every character. The arcade mode will also give a bit of a backstory for each fencer - for now just with text, which will be replaced by art or cinematics in the future.
I can't really say when the update will be finished, but it's going well, so hopefully very soon.
Since the previous update we also 3D scanned and prepared a lot of new historical clothes models for constructing the upcoming new characters. Amongst them: Scottish and Carpathian Highlanders, Ottoman Galley Comito, Tatar Raider, Danzig longsword master, French smallsword fencer, and a whole bunch of Nobleones... I mean, nobles! Those will come in the next updates, after this one. We also have prepared clothes for NPCs and bystanders for populating cutscenes and the arenas during combat. We are slowly reaching the "critical mass" of characters in the game for starting to compose animatics for the main Story mode.
Thank you for your patience and continuous support :)
Update 2022.10.17.0
Hellish Quart pre-alpha v. 2022.10.17.0
TWEAK:
- Physics system tweaks for better collisions
- Different physics collision calculation system
- Increased velocity calculation iterations after a blade bounce
FIX:
- Increased maximum sword physics velocity to prevent sword damping
- Tweaks to collision detection system to prevent blades from getting stuck for split second due to "unsolvable" scenarios
NEW:
- checked the Windows Mixed Reality headset support checkbox on Steam Store (tested on HP Reverb G2 and RTX3080ti)
- new Arena: Village Huts
Known issues:
- VR: colorful borders may be visible in WMR headsets on some graphics cards (for example visible on RTX2070 but not visible on RTX3080, looks like a driver error and not something I could fix in the game)
- Regression: Audio of killing strikes sometimes gets cut off
Update 2022.09.28.0 (Vsync)
- Vsync options (changing Vsync requires restarting the game!)
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Tip for anyone who has a "monster" monitor (for example 4K, 360Hz), but medium grade graphics card (for example GF 2060):
Set the Graphics options like this:
Update 2022.09.23.0 (Small fixes)
FIX:
- a few small fixes for the Right of Way mechanics
- fixed bug where dropped objects (heads, swords...) would slide on the ground
- Fixed Father Zera playing regular death animations in ROW mode instead of ROW win / lose animations
Right of Way Update
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Hellish Quart pre-alpha v. 2022.09.21.0
NEW:
- Right Of Way mode now has special Defeat animations that can blend from Lose to Win state, depending on the Right of Way Double Kill result.
- Marta: Tired and Limping movement animations
TWEAK:
- Father Zera: Walk Backward animation is a bit faster
Update 2022.09.17.0
FIX:
- Fixed resetting the training mode score if Rematch is pressed
TWEAK:
- The fight break after scoring a hit in training mode is reduced to 2.4s
NEW:
- Added a manual Set Target FPS override in Graphics Options, that will override the auto detection settings. This is for supporting cases where the player has multiple monitors with different refresh rates each, and the game detects just the primary monitor's refresh rate, while you want to actually play on the second monitor, or through Steam Link on your TV, etc.