Polishing Combat

We've been working on the "Focus" combat system this week, where Shuyan goes 1v1 with an enemy, as opposed to the "Arena" combat mode where she takes on groups. We're developing it sort of like a real-time version of the quick-time sequences you'll find in some games. In other words, there are alerts to move up or down, or to hit a specific key, but Shuyan is still free during these sequences to use all her regular moves. In the Focus combat mode, you can go through different block sequences, which open up attack combo sequences, and they're given alerts on how effectively they blocked, countered, or attacked (think Dance Dance Revolution with Kung-Fu). Now to the updates! We made some tweaks to the "greet-counter" follow-up system. Now it can rank accuracy of the greets and counters with "perfect greet" and "perfect counter" if you're spot-on with the moves. Players are also rewarded for higher accuracy, as Shuyan will throw in a few moves of her own with "Great" and "Perfect" greets. You can see the system in action here:

If your timing is good, the follow-up attack animation plays automatically. On the other hand, if you swipe too early, you'll get a "Too Early" and the opponent will land the attack. You can see the "Too Early" results here:

In addition to the main story, the game has a full Tournament Mode where you can jump right into combat, and we've recently made it so the two modes interconnect. Any moves unlocked through the narrative story mode will added to Tournament Mode.

The story mode, as we've mentioned before, is focused strongly on narrative, and uses a more comic-book style. Here's one of of the scenes from one of Shuyan's early getaways just as a refresher:

Also, we made a smaller change on the main menu. The Shuyan logo is now animated with fire crackling around it. Check it out here:

Aside from these, we've also been working on more of the core functions of Shuyan. More specifically, we recently modified the playmaker tutorials to support multiple platforms. We don't want to detail the specific new platforms until we can say for sure, but we are doing some prep work to see what we can do :)