Hey all,

I haven’t had much of a chance to work on this game since my last update due to getting carried away on a side project, but I do have some big news that I’m eager to share (and which should be immediately obvious given the title :P). I’ve also done some work on character-specific abilities, bug fixing, and menu navigation, so read below the fold!

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

News:

First up, I’d like to talk about the big news. For a while now, I haven’t been happy with Samurai Showdown as a name. This is not because it’s a bad name but because it’s such a good name that someone else already used it! As such, I’d like to introduce you to Otterspace Game’s latest project, Samurai Smash!

Samurai Smash keeps the overall feel of the original name, improves Search Engine Optimisation (a boring but essential part of game development), and is generally better at getting across what the game intends to be.

Now, before you read on, check out the awesome updated logo done by one of the talented artists involved in the project.

Deep Dive – Abilities:

Continuing on from last week’s look at the precog and button-mash abilities, I’ve been hard at work implementing more abilities into Samurai Smash such as the Barricade ability.

Barricade:

Simply put, the barricade ability prevents a player from scoring for as long as it takes them to bash through its health by button-mashing. Unlike other abilities currently being designed and implemented, the barricade ability uses a health-based system of determining whether a player can score points, and the only way to damage the barricade is through mashing as many buttons as possible as quickly as possible.

This ability is designed to reward both strategic players who want to disorientate their opponent when they’re in the middle of a chain of buttons, and those players who are in a neck and neck in a race to the finish with their opponent and are looking for an edge.

New Features and Changes:

• Implemented Barricade ability.
• Improved ability use UI to improve game feel and provide better information.
• Improved menu navigation UI by replacing old select graphic with a new, more obvious graphic.

Planned Features/Work In Progress:

• Redesign the game options screen to be more informative, prettier, and generally better.
• More abilities and balancing existing abilities.
• Implement new character sprites.
• Improve point scoring feel by adding additional animation.

Bugfixing:

• Fixed issue where controller 2 could be used on certain menus.
• Fixed issue where certain menu’s navigations scripts weren’t set up correctly.

Final Notes:

As you can probably tell, I haven’t been too busy working on Samurai Smash, but I plan to change that this coming week as I get some more feedback from people and get some additional art done. With luck, I’ll have the next version of Samurai Smash up on our Itch.IO page soon!

See ya!