June Devlog: Gameplay details for Keylocker
This gonna be big, I spent too much time living as a hermit, hiding all of this, I’m bursting. Also, monthly devlogs will be a thing from now onwards.
So guys, this game is fully done in pixel art! Portraits and menus are also in pixel art and everything is the same pixel size. This was a step up for us since doing the portraits is now 10 times faster, and it’ll allow for us to do palette swaps on everything. Big step up for consistency as well! We also added a slight chromatic aberration effect for a more retro/80s general vibe, as I was graphically inspired by PC Engine titles and 80s anime for this game. You can take the effect off if it bothers you, though! Now, check this very attractive menu palette swap:
Now, for the fun part: Combat!
The first major difference from Virgo is the absense of Purity.
In this world, Music produces Electricity.
This means you’ll have to use your personal Electricity Points (EP) in battle as well as your overall health represented by Life Points (LP). By itself, Electricity doesn’t do much, but is your base fuel for your LIFE moves. You can generate more EP by playing music with ELECTRIC moves.
In battle, you’ll juggle between Life Attack, Life Defense, Electric Attack and Electric Defense. Each with a different purpose. Each of these slots can be customized with several types of equippable items, but in general, you’ll equip weapons to LIFE slots and musical instruments to ELECTRIC slots.
With Electric Attacks you’ll use your instrument to attack the enemy and steal their Electricity, dealing Life damage if their EP bar is empty. Like so:
With Electric Defenses, you’ll generate Electricity after playing music with a rhythm-inspired timed-hit, but that also causes enemies who hit you to damage your EP instead of Life.
After you have built some EP, holding the attack button will begin charging your Life Attack, adding your EP into your next Life Attack damage, equal to EP spent, like so:
With this you can control how much damage you deal to an enemy. This is why draining enemy EP will be so important to stay alive, as it’s a constant potential damage bonus.
Holding the defense button will though add EP into a third bar, which functions like proto-purity; deflecting the next hit you take into a counter-attack, which will function differently per equipment you use. Like so:
Most equipment pieces will be equippable on more than one slot.
For example, the KATANA can be assigned to Life Attack or Life Defense depending on your preferences, but a GUN BASS can be either Electric Attack or Life Attack. Depending on the slot you put an equipment in, their animations and effects will be different. Some other items may be more specialized into a single function.
HOWEVER, equipment won’t feature a Skill anymore, as the effects of skills will be acquired from the Talent Tree (more info on that on a future post) and will apply to any equipment you have. We don’t have the Tree implemented yet, but we have an idea of how it is and plan on working on it soon.
This doesn’t mean equipment variation will be just cosmetic!
Apart from different timed-hits, equipment will define skill speed (faster speed = more turns you’ll have, with Ben’s new speed calculations!), targetting (if the attack is melee, ranged, area, etc) and if it’s on the Life Defense slot, also define how the Counter will play out.
Equipment will still have stat ups and downs, but unlike in Virgo, it’s going to be 1 up, 1 down, because Power and the baseline ATK stats have been synthethized into Minimum and Maximum damage.
(That’s something I really liked about how old CRPGs handled damage, with things like “Damage: 22-48” instead of an average, since I believe there’s going to be some sort of min-maxing relative to EP spent, so knowing your absolute highest roll for an attack is more important than ever)
So, now you’ll have battle loadouts, you can put a certain array of equipment in a loadout and change between them in the battles. A lot of people asked for access to equipment during battles, but that would make the difficulty gravely decrease, so we’re adding an alternative instead that can help everyone!
Not fully implemented for Bobo, her Alpaca, Rocket, or any NPC and enemy yet, BUT we can already change menu colors as you saw already. This is mind boggling to me and when Veyerals and Ben made it I wanted to cry it was a very emotional moment :( BUT in the future you’ll be able to change BOBO’s hair and jacket color on the saloon, as well as Rocket’s metal color.
Some Virgo things you can expect to return in Keylocker but will be discussed in future posts:
Interaction with ALL objects
SHMUP minigame (representing the HACKING sessions, we’re very inspired by Nier Automata’s hacking minigame)
More posts this month to talk about the characters and any small things we do! Development posts will resume normally now, so expect me to be more active around these parts of the internet! :D