KatFS Alpha Devlog #11 (May 2025)

Hello all, and welcome to another KatFS Alpha devlog! What do we have this month? Let's get straight to it:

Heads up, many animated GIFs below! (Albeit Itch's 3MB limit should keep them at bay)

ANIMATED CUTSCENES! (Well, just this one for now)

Picking back up right from where the last devlog ended, the first animated (or rather, "animatic") cutscene for the KatFS game has been properly implemented with its own art assets. This scene happens right before the end of the prologue and starting chapter of the game, where Kalia trips up while crossing a rickety bridge in the zombie caves and falls into the abyss below. The cutscene combines animated artwork depicting the event as well as in-game occurrences such as Kalia losing almost all her health and getting back up right before the player regains control. The cutscene system is robust and easy to set up, with most of the work being in making the art and animating it in Unity (which is to be expected).

This system enables detailed cutscenes for future moments in the game that can't be done justice via the game's top-down perspective.

JUST GO OVER IT

This is a system that I've had in planning for a while but procrastinated on implementing due to other tasks having taken priority until recently. Attacks fired in an arch, such as Kalia's "fire bomb", can go over low obstacles and hit targets on the other side! This is done via assigning a "virtual height" value to every entity or collision object that should be low enough to allow for this interaction. Then, this height can be checked by the attack to determine if it should hit the obstacle or go over it.

With this feature now functional, perhaps NPCs should get their own arched attacks as well? How does skeleton archers that can fire over obstacles sound? >:]

FANCIER ABILITIES

In the middle of May, I've decided it was time to revisit some old visuals and bring them more up to par with how I intend the final game to look and feel. Let's start with new animations for Kalia's first two special abilities. These have double the amount of frames and showcase Kalia's personality much better through the way she performs these attacks.

The fire drain ability got some special particle effects. This one is still a work-in-progress though, but it at least provides better feedback to the player whenever they use this ability.

Finally, some prototyping for Kalia's sixth special ability - the fire explosion! This ability costs a lot of magic and needs some time to be prepared (during which Kalia must not get interrupted!), but if it is successfully activated, it creates a massive explosion that deals immense damage to anything in its way! 

Not only is it very effective in combat, but this ability also deals the same special explosive damage that the explosive props do! Remember the ones Kalia had to detonate in the mines chapter of the pre-alpha to destroy rock obstacles? Once this ability is unlocked, Kalia is no longer dependent on these explosives and is able to blow up any obstacles she comes across! Expect this ability to only get unlocked in the latter half of the game, however...

THE NEW SENTINEL

Speaking of the pre-alpha demo, you might remember the first boss fight in it, the "damaged guardian". In the full game, it is being translated to the "Staff Sentinel", an automaton that wakes up when Kalia frees the Fire Staff from its containment and immediately attacks her in an attempt to defend the artifact. The new sentinel has a completely different look, taking more inspiration from Meso-American civilizations which is the main reference behind the ruins in KatFS. In particular, this one is referenced from Incan statues:

Automatons are inorganic, therefore their animations should feel inorganic. In order to work smarter and also have more fine control over how it moves, a bespoke system for animating it has been implemented. The sentinels can rotate their upper body to always face the player regardless of their orientation, like a creepy spinning totem. They also have an unique walk cycle in that it has been coded as a procedural animation, rather than drawn frame-by-frame:

It even adapts to different move speeds, always ensuring the steps are properly synchronized with the world space!

More implementations are underway for this boss fight, including its abilities which will differ slightly from the ones in the pre-alpha.

INNOVATIONS TO COME

While I've always been able to maintain a slow but steady form of progress in my work for this game, the last couple of months have felt like a massive "developer block", in which I had just been going through motions with not many ideas, goals or motivation for the next parts of the project. But recently, I've gotten into new games and discussions that have not only rekindled the passion behind the project, but also given a boatload of new ideas for it!

Okay, but let's slow down first. We can't let scope creep make its way into the project - KatFS has always been meant to be a project that could reasonably be completed even as a mostly solo endeavor. Not only that, but it's important to keep the gameplay loop concise and not turn it into a mish-mash of impulsive ideas that don't work together. That being said, the new inspirations were not completely new ideas, but rather ideas on how to refine mechanics that were being planned for the game but not quite there yet.

Specifically, KatFS features an elemental damage system that has seen very little practical use in gameplay so far. The only elemental interactions implemented in the game have been in the pre-alpha demo chapter 3, where wet entities were resistant to fire and the goblin wizards could use freezing attacks to slow Kalia down. The bulk of the new inspiration came in the form of an idea for a more complex and complete set of elemental interactions, that makes different elements of the environment and enemy attacks feel more relevant and keep gameplay more diverse.

These interactions wouldn't be restricted to what NPCs can do to the player though! While the player is only able to wield fire magic in KatFS, what's to say that the player couldn't trigger other elemental effects via interacting with the environment and NPCs in specific ways? For example, the player might come across a piece of damaged ancient machinery that zaps anything nearby with shock damage whenever it gets hit with a fire attack!

All in all, these new ideas would allow me to return to the early glory days of KatFS development where I could allow myself to just crank out new mechanics and systems even before I get to actually apply them to the game. The start to KatFS sticks to the basics, but it's important to have a full suite of game mechanics to work with while building the game! Anyway, I leave you with the current state of the KatFS Trello board just to give an idea of what I'll be working on next:

Hope to have more on these to show in the next month! But for now, this is all. As always, grateful for your attention! :]