Hello! It's been a little while.

Iris!

Since the last post, I've been working on introducing 'Iris', a major character and the game's third boss fight! A peculiar young person that Saki first encounters hovering ominously around the Otherworld. He seems shy, and uneager to reveal his exact reason for being there.

As with most story things, I'll be keeping mostly quiet about their identity and role in the story to avoid spoilers. However, I'll try to put together a small bio page for them on the website in the next few days, to accompany the other ones (and to finally make good on the 7-month-old 'More characters coming soon!' note!).

As a side note, their portrait draft is probably my favorite I've done so far, and I especially like how the extreme facial expressions turned out. I also like how the simpler look of the hair turned out relative to the other portraits, so I think I'll try to lean more into that more as I try to figure out a concrete art style.

Boss Fight

While the animations themselves are obviously unfinished and very rough, I've completed the gameplay functionality for all of Iris' boss fight moveset!

Physically, Iris is a fairly weak, unskilled and unconfident fighter, and so relies on 'nontraditional' techniques and their Mark's frightening power to survive.

Iris' power allows them to grow sharp, spear-like objects from their body and any surface they're in contact with--bursting out with enough force to easily impale anything in their path. They can vary in size, from short needles, to large spikes the size of a person.

His moveset revolves around using these spears in conjunction with snares and his bizarre techniques to create strings of attacks that force the player to chain Perfect Blocks together rapidly. While initially a little imposing in their speed, he doesn't have many strings and they all have consistent timing, so I'm hoping he can serve as sort of a tutorial on rapid consecutive Perfect Blocks.

A minor unique mechanic for this boss fight is the 'Snare', a status effect that briefly prevents the player moving and is applied when they are hit by or block certain attacks. It's exclusively used in the middle of strings, and is removed the moment the player is hit by or blocks the next attack in the string, or performs a dodge. I think it's a cool touch of flavor to Iris' style of combat, and prevents the spears from being too easy to avoid just by moving out of the way.

Iris is also the first enemy to use strings that mix standard attacks with Critical attacks that can only be avoided by dodging--which the snare also plays a role in.

Making things more confusing, he unfortunately doesn't seem to have a full grasp on controlling his own powers...

There were a lot of unique mechanics to Iris that made developing their boss fight a little harder than the previous boss, Livio, but it was very enjoyable (even if it's still not entirely finished). I find unconventional fighters like Iris to be an incredibly fun to animate and plan movesets for, and I'm really happy with how their moveset turned out.

Conclusion/Personal Note

Progress on the game has been regrettably slow lately :(. Without dwelling on anything too depressing, a variety of life events have made the past month especially difficult for me, and while working on the game has been a nice distraction, gathering the motivation to do so has been hard.

My main focus has still be on the script. I've finally managed to finish the first draft of the script for Chapter 4, and am going to do my best to plow through 5 as fast as I can. I have a bad habit of being overly scrutinizing while writing and slowing myself down a lot, which I really want to break--especially considering this is only the first draft...!

In an effort to stave off potential burnout, I've also been considering working on a much smaller side projects to break up the otherwise constant SBH work. It's been a few years since I've worked on any other major projects, so I think a little variety might be nice, even if it ultimately doesn't go anywhere. I'll continue to work on SBH, regardless, though--I don't think I'd be able to stop working on this game even if I wanted to, haha.

Thanks for reading!

- HSTopaz 

(Cross-posted from the website.)