Hello everybody!

The weather is getting warm again and everybody I know is stuck at home, so now would be a good time to touch base and talk about how the project has been going since the last update. Short answer is: quite well actually! This game is still in development, but since this is a hobby project it's hard to find the time to keep up the conversation on how its progressing.

But now, I've compiled some things to talk about.

Fanart Submission

To start off with, we're allowing people to submit fanart to be used in the game as a prop! We ran into a part of a dungeon where there's a ton of posters that needed to get made, and figured it'd be a good opportunity to let people submit a bunch of fanart to display as a kind of overworld gallery. The theme of the fanart is "fake movie posters", and it can star any of the characters from Kura5, Boktai, Lunar Knights or the BN crossover.

Here's the form link -> https://forms.gle/ZajPFpb7MbCH1B517

Going to keep this form open until June. Anybody is welcome to submit, regardless of skill level. Specific rules are in the form link above.

Rehauled Input

During the beta, a lot of people reported that they had trouble getting gamepads to work properly for Kura5 and that the default keyboard scheme felt uncomfortable to use. In response to this, I've trashed Kura5's old input system and have swapped to a new one that allows for easier remapping and more comfortable usage of non-XBox gamepads. Hoping this makes things easier for people to play. Thank you to everyone who played the beta and gave this constructive criticism.

Dungeon/Game Progress

In Kura5, there are 5 immortals that you will deal with throughout the story, meaning that there will be five immortal dungeons, counting the final area. If you've played the demo, you've already tangled with one of these immortal dungeons, but what about the other five? 

Well, as of writing this, the 2nd dungeon is almost done! Almost. Purification has yet to be hooked up and there's some placeholder art that needs to be replaced and rough spots that need to be spit-shinned, but most of it is playable from beginning to end. This is a big deal because out of all the dungeons in the game, this one has the most unique structure out of all the dungeons in-game. It was pretty challenging figuring out how to put it all together!

What about the rest? Well first I want to briefly talk about how a Kura5 dungeon gets made. Kura5's dungeons go through a few different phases:

• Idea: Where we lay down the big ideas of a dungeon, what is the story and what obstacles show up in this part of the game?
• Planning: Where the dungeon's room to room flow gets written out on a piece of grid paper. Snippets of dialogue or enemy layouts can be attached to each room. At this point we also tend to make music for the dungeon once we lay the mood down.
• Scripting: The writing and dialogue gets written/more fleshed out to make sure it meshes with the dungeon flow. This step can happen before, during, or after the planning phase.
• Blocking: This is where the dungeon starts to take form, we lay out some textureless blocks and placeholders to give the dungeon its shape, and allow people to test how it feels. This way its easy for us to make changes if something feels off, because...
• Art: Art's gotta get made. The models, the VFX, the final music, portraits, all of it. This is the part that takes forever which is why blocking is important.
• Final Polish: The bells and whistles of the dungeon. Adding on the final little touches to make it feel "alive".

I like planning stuff on pieces of paper because I'm more comfortable drawing by hand. Everyone's different! These are the cleanest docs I have though, everything else looks like ink spaghetti...

Planning can also mean doodling out staging. A lot of things are liable to change in between phases too, like most of the stuff above.

Above is what a level looks like while it's being blocked out!

With all of this in mind, this is how all of the non demo dungeons are doing.

So good progress has been made on the immortal front, but we're not going to be able to block out the undead dungeons until a little later, even though their planning docs are sitting on the shelf when ready.

Of course, with the dungeon development there also comes other new things like items, portraits, cutscenes, enemies, etc. We're steadily working towards finishing those, and also updating older things along the way.

And that's all for this devlog. When will I write up another one? Maybe sometime in the future.

Goodbye for now and may the Sun be with you!