2025-W14

Writing this now, the week is almost over. But I'm gonna try to make Development Blogs a weekly thing. They're also probably gonna be a lot more word-dense, less polished, and less link-heavy than usual articles on this site.

It's been a while since I've done any sort of devlog at all, and I'm thinking of maybe turning these into YouTube videos at some point, so I should probably recap what's been happening the past while for anybody who doesn't keep up to date with the patch notes on this website.

Since the last time I showed off the game anywhere, the main menu has been entirely redesigned. I haven't really had time to update the Steam page yet showing all of this off, but the menu looks quite different from how it used to.

Fan Art

Let me start by saying how incredibly lucky I am that my game has spawned fan art. To show my appreciation I've added a fan art gallery to the game, and all of the fan artists featured in the gallery will have their names in the credits of the game as well of course.

Speaking of which... I really gotta get around to adding a credits screen.

Official Art

For one, the title screen and main menu have this beautiful new Mercury artwork from SpadeInTheDirt (also just known as Spade). It looks absolutely stunning and he did an amazing job on it. I didn't ask him to make this, it's technically fanart, but everything he works on just turns out so incredible that I had to put it in the game.

Spade also drew the new Steam art for the game, which just makes the game's page look just so much nicer in the Steam client.

Voice Acting

Speaking of things that other people did, Cyanide and Mercury now both have voice acting.

For now there are just combat voicelines, and for Cyanide she has some menu voicelines. In the future, the announcer will be voiced by my friend Adeen because they asked me early on in development to be the announcer.

Cashew

Cashew is the newest character I've been working on. The initial idea was that she was going to be a Smash Bros inspired character, and her main gimmick was going to be a move called "Eep" (a parody of Jigglypuff's Rest from the Smash Bros series) where she would fall asleep.

Her visual design is meant to be evocative of sleepwear, but if you don't like it, there is planned to be an optional skin to give her pants.

Skinning Support

That brings me to the next thing I want to talk about. The game technically has skinning support now. This doesn't just mean character skins like you might be used to from League of Legends or other popular live service games, but it also means changing the look of UI elements, changing sound effects, or even changing voicelines which could be used to dub the game into different languages later in development.

For anybody familiar with Minecraft Resource Packs, it's a very similar concept to that, and you can even stack them on top of each other. There isn't yet a menu for this though, and none of it is properly explained, so it's somewhat arcane.

Parry Mechanic

There is a brand new parry mechanic in the game. It's kind of like a great equalizer of range. Previously there wasn't much you could do about Pierce the Veil. You could jump over it, but it still felt finicky to deal with. The parry is essentially THE answer to this move, as least if it's being spammed a lot.

When you press E, you enter a parry stance. After half a second in the parry stance you'll be stunned, this is a failed parry. But, if the enemy attacks you during your parry stance, then they will be automatically stunned instead. So essentially the parry is a bet of "Something is going to hit me in the next half a second."

It's worth noting that throws can't be parried, so if you know somebody is going to parry, you can grab them, or just wait for their parry to fail. This parry is inspired by the shield from Melty Blood and the counter of Smash Bros. It's meant to be a great equalizer that allows characters to properly combat powerful ranged attacks.

The Death of Auto Guard

Previously the game had a mechanic called "Auto Guard" where if you held the E button you could guard all attacks. High/low, left/right, anything that was blockable at all could be blocked with Auto Guard. I'm glad I tried it out, but it didn't work as intended. Here were the problems:

Push Block

Firstly, Auto Guard doubled as a push block. Which means when you used it, it would push the opponent really far away. This meant that it completely got you out of harms way for very little cost.

Quick Recovery

Secondly, the guard meter that was used by the Auto Guard mechanic recovered over time, and it recovered fast enough that by the time you got back in range of your opponent, you probably had full meter again.

No Downsides

The result of all of this was that you would pretty much just hold E the entire game and automatically block anything as long as you weren't attacking. There was no risk, no decision-making, and it was blatantly overpowered.

Camera Changes

Speaking of things that just straight up didn't work, let's talk about the camera. For a while I tried making it so the camera could zoom out infinitely, sort of like Smash Bros. You could just keep going to the end of the stage and the camera would keep zooming out.

Most fighting games don't work like that but I thought it might work for Blades because of the game's attacks and movements were generally a lot bigger than other fighting games. Marvel vs Capcom doesn't do that though, and maybe I should've taken that as an omen.

The problem with having the camera zoom out infinitely is that it gives you less ability to design cool stuff. At first it seems like it's a win/win, you can make bigger moves if you want to, you're not limited by screen size. But actually screen size is an important part of making an attack's range matter at all.

Pierce the Veil for example is an attack that hits from almost full screen away. It's crazy long ranged, and because of the limited screen size, it threatens a significant part of your available space.

Whereas with the camera zooming out infinitely, it essentially became a mild annoyance that just forced you to be further away a lot of the time. It wasn't ever really gonna hit you because you could just walk away as far as you needed to, it only served to get in the way of you getting close.

The Future

However, as with Auto Guard, I'm still glad I tried this camera experiment. Some people have mistakenly gotten the idea that Blades is different from other fighting games because I don't understand how fighting games work, but that couldn't really be further from the truth.

While I'm not that good at fighting games, I'm very familiar with their design choices. Not just the big obvious ones, but also tiny things that players would be unlikely to notice or care about. But I'm going to keep experimenting with new ideas because if even a tiny fraction of those ideas work, it'll be well worth it. And even if they don't, at least I'll have learned something.

Also yes Watburnt I know pressure isn't that interesting right now, I just haven't really figured out what I wanna do with it yet.