Arbiter - Monthly Recap - April 2022 (Patreon)

Ahoy! Hope everyone's doing well as always. It's been a bit of a slow month again but it's all in preparation for fun stuff this month, so let's get to it!

With the first two weeks of April I was able to pretty much finish up Scarlet's Form! That puts me at a little over 50% of the way done with Arbiter's transformation system at about seven months in. 

Truthfully I'm about a month behind schedule, but I think it's because I underestimated how many systems I'd have to rewrite to get Scarlet to work properly. I ended up having to recreate the movement, collision, and projectile systems and I think those are mostly what set me back a bit. Nevertheless it feels pretty good to be over halfway done with the forms, and I'm confident I can finish them all up by the end of the year (probably around August/September).

After wrapping up with Scarlet, I had to put together a progress video and build for the grant I received from Humble. That took about a week to throw together, but afterwards I got started on the next form: Omen, The Beserker's Rage.

Omen is the third form in the game and focuses on aggressive, melee-focused crowd-control. He's a vengeful whip-sword-swinging berserker who will gladly trade blows with his enemy if it means taking them down with him. While Wolf is all about style and speed, and Scarlet is all about motion and range, Omen is focused on pure destructive rage.

Each boss in the game looks at the different ways greater spirits try to regain their humanity. Wolf is focused purely on acquiring power, so his design is somewhere between human and spirit. Scarlet is focused on beauty, and her thirst for humanity has her looking almost human herself. Omen, conversely, is an enormous beast with almost no humanity left to spare. 

I spent the last week or so finalizing my plans for Omen's moveset and rigging his model so that he's ready for animation. All of that has been wrapped up and he's pretty much good to go, so I'll be spending the next month or so doing nothing but animating!

I'd like to think that due to its unruly nature, Omen's form is incredibly hard for Ashe to control. This leads to his attacks lacking the finesse and precision of his other forms, resulting in him swinging his sword around with reckless abandon. He'll be regularly hitting all enemies around him while using the utility of his whip-sword to keep them close, so the form serves as a good option for when you just want to kill everything on the screen at the cost of your mobility (he's a bit slower too).

The inspiration for Omen's form includes Guts from Berserk (obviously), Byleth from Three Houses, and Artorias from Dark Souls. Basically I just wanted a giant sword-wielding badass hitting everything around him without a care in the world, and that's what I'm gonna do. I'll be starting animation work this week, so hope to see some cool stuff soon!

That wraps things up for April! We've seen a small influx of backers since I started posting combo videos again, so I'm going to try and keep doing that as much as possible. I probably won't have Omen in-game for about a month or two though, so it might be lots of Scarlet and Wolf in the meantime, hah. At any rate, thanks again everyone for your continued support!

Cheers,
Jordy