Heya,

Among other things I've been working on since my last update, I've been working flat out on implementing game-changing powers, improving Samurai Showdown's visuals to ensure players know exactly what is going on, and hunting down and fixing a very annoying profile bug. While the latest version of the game hasn't been deployed to Itch.IO just yet, you can expect it to be on our page shortly.

For more on what exactly has changed and what's next, read below the line!

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts, so let me know via Facebook or Twitter.

Deep Dive – Abilities:

Something I've wanted to add to Samurai Showdown for a while now has been abilities which alter how players engage with the game and which can allow an underdog to even the odds. As such, I've been putting a lot of thought into what abilities would A) work in the context of Samurai Showdown's somewhat unique control scheme, and would B) not break the balance of the game while simultaneously being worthwhile enough to drive people to want to unlock the characters which have said abilities.

So far, the result of this work has bee the design and implementation of the precog passive ability, and the button-mash activatable ability.

Precog:

As a passive ability, the precog ability is active throughout an entire match and does not need to be charged before use. This ability provides the owning player with a small but consistent advantage over their opponent by giving them a look further down the list of buttons they need to hit. While this isn't as impressive as knocking out your opponent, it lets players recognise when a sequence of buttons is occurring and improves their reaction speed accordingly.

Button-mash:

In contrast to the passive, precog ability, the button-mash ability must first be charged by scoring a number of points. Once charged, the ability can be activated by the player and, for a limited time, every button being targetted by the player will be set to a copy of whichever button was active at the time the ability was activated. I.E: If a triangle is the target button when the button-mash ability is activated, every button after that will also be a triangle until the charge on the ability runs out.

New Features and Changes:

• Implemented the precog and button-mash powers.
• Characters now fade away when they die. Will be improved once death animations are available.
• The win panel at the end of a match now displays which items players will unlock on their next level up.
• Improved UI navigation and information by changing the selection border to a chevron and by adding a character description field to the character selection screen.
• Improved accessibility by changing directional arrow colour, increasing button prompt size, and by adding a drop shadow to text and button indicators.

Planned Features/Work In Progress:

• Continue designing and implementing abilities.
• Improve ability UI by changing star icon to radially filled circle.
• Profile-based stat tracking.
• Improve player control over match details. (Button count, match length, etc.).

Bugfixing:

• Characters are now unlocked properly. No more locked characters despite players being a high enough level to have access to them.

Final Notes:

As you can probably tell, it's been a busy two weeks for me so far and I've got plenty of things I want to implement before I upload the next version of Samurai Showdown to Itch.IO. In addition, I also want to begin writing updates more often as I've been somewhat neglectful of my promise and I think that a more rapid update cycle would be useful.

In any case, I wish everyone a great time until next week.

See ya!