Developer Update: Castle of Vice 1st Combat Demonstration.

Hello everyone,

Today I bring you a video about what basic combat will be like in Castle of Vice.

Please keep in mind that I still have to work on the combat balance, so don't assume that the enemy strength shown here will be the same in the Alpha demo version.

Before diving into the video, let me explain a bit about what you are going to see.

At the start, you will see the path selection phase of the exploration of the castle. You may choose your path according to what you want or need. I selected the combat path, which grants XP if won. If I had chosen the other path, the event path, I may have received a potion or item if I succeeded in the event.

For the combat itself, I wanted to make it faster than in standard turn-based games, so I decided to use an energy point system, which allows you and the enemies to attack at any moment without waiting for a turn as long as you (or the enemies) have energy to use the skills.

You will see that at some points in the video, when the enemy is about to act, a big and small circle appear on them. This is for the parry system that I implemented. Once the big circle is reduced to the small circle, that is your window to parry.

Parry blocks the entire enemy action (some items will also give extra benefits upon a successful parry), but for the parry system to be activated, two conditions must be met:

1-      The skill must cause damage (Skills that only apply a debuff cannot be parried)

2-      You must know what skill the enemy will use. This means that the icon on the bottom left of the enemy's bars cannot show a Question mark (?).

When the enemy selects a skill to use, Annelise can infer it based on her perception against the enemy's perception.

Skills that apply debuffs may not be parry, but you can resist them with stats like Willpower and Constitution.

If you check the adventure log in the top-left corner of the screen, you may see that at a few moments, there is a contest between the attacker vs the defender to confirm if a debuff applies.

On a side note, the logic for erotic attacks on the enemies is there, but I have disabled them to show how regular combat is like.

That will be all the explanation for now.

I hope you find the demonstration interesting. Let me know what you think of it, and if you have any feedback, please don't hesitate to share it with me.

CombatDemo (Vimeo)