Bloodstained: latest Kickstarter update

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is an action/adventure/platformer game helmed by Koji Igarashi, considered the godfather of the Metroidvania “genre”. In the past few weeks, the developers published two updates on the game’s Kickstarter page, in order to give some precious information to backers and fans who are simply waiting for the game to come out.

Credits and survey reminder

First, if you backed the game and haven’t filled in the survey, make sure to do it as soon as possible!

Next, some good news for people will a long name: you can now add a 26 character name to the credits. This option is only available to backers with a $100+ pledge.

Shaders

Last month, Koji Igarashi posted the following message on the game’s Kickstarter page:

Good evening, Army of the Night! It’s time for another production update. The good news is that I’ve “run into” another longtime colleague—one of the most talented Igavania planners out there. With his help we’re locking down a lot of key pieces of the design.

We haven’t had a lot of new assets to show so far, but the good news is that next month we hope to be able to show you a few of the shaders we’re trying out, so that you can tell us how we’re doing. There are a lot of moving pieces, but we’re hoping to get them locked down soon so we can move on to other pieces of the game. Using special shaders means we’ll need to build out backgrounds first before we can move on to characters and enemies. So we’ve been generating a lot of background art. (It’s still in the early concept phase, so we aren’t ready to show it in detail yet.)

You may wonder why we’ve taken this approach rather than building out the game stage by stage. Because shaders will affect the tone of the entire stage, we think it’s better to see the look of the entire screen before moving forward. That means rather than characters or enemies, backgrounds serve the best purpose here.

So now that we’ve generated a lot of background concept art, the artists are carefully examining it to decide on the appropriate visual design. After all, this is an Igavania game—atmosphere is key, and the background and foreground have to work together. After the backgrounds are polished, we throw enemies on top to see how gameplay and atmosphere will interact. Since all of this is so important, we want to make sure backers have the chance to be heard when we choose our shaders. As always, thank you for your patience.

With that, it’s time I get back to finishing the story! The deadline I set for myself is right around the corner, so I’d best get back to work. I don’t have all the character stories locked down yet, but the ones I do have are really cool. Really! I can’t wait to tell you more in our next updates.

But before I go, I wanted to allow our super-talented new planner to introduce himself. You can decide for yourself whether we have the right man for the job or not!

Head after the break for the rest of the post!

Here’s the message by Shutaro Iida:

Hello everyone! My name is Shutaro Iida. I’m a longtime 2D Igavania planner you may also know as “Curry the Kid”! Getting the chance to work with IGA again on another Igavania game is incredibly exciting! In previous games I did a lot of the programming, but I also put together an enemy character here and there in my spare time.

I’m going to make sure the team works to maintain that classic Igavania feel while still introducing enough new bosses, secrets, and scenes to keep all of you guessing. I’m really excited to be here, and thanks again for making Bloodstained happen!

Here’s some concept-art for the game:

And in yesterday’s update, the developers finally showed the first two shaders mentioned by Koji Igarashi in the previous update. This is all part of their promise to let backers follow the game’s development process in real time.

Here’s the first shader:

This shader contains lighting, fog, and character brightness effects designed to give it a 2D look. I feel bad about how much I demanded from the development team!

Here’s the second shader:

For this shader we desaturated the colors, enhanced the shadows, and used hatched lines to fade between light and shadow. I think this one looks especially unique.

Customisation

Here’s a picture that shows how you will be able to customise the appearance of the protagonist:

Ask IGA

Here’s the 6th Ask IGA video:

Zangetsu

Finally, here’s Koji Igarashi introducing one of the characters: Zangetsu.

Coming from a small country far away in the East, Zangetsu specializes in fighting demons. He makes his way to England when the demons first show up 10 years before the main story of Bloodstained begins.

He uses a dual katana fighting style along with Japanese “ofuda” paper incantations to destroy his demonic foes.

During his long battle to keep the demons at bay he loses his left eye and right arm. Using a special Ofuda spell he is able to animate a wooden prosthetic arm to nearly the same level of mobility as his original arm. The Ofuda that covers his missing left eye grants him the ability to see both auras of both the living and dead.

He lost a great deal of friends during his 10 years of fighting, creating an absolute hatred for not only the creatures themselves but also the Alchemists that brought them to the Earth.

 

Zangetsu is a character I came up with when trying to answer this question: What happened in the lost time between the appearance of the demons on earth and Miriam’s awakening 10 years later?

In all my games I’ve never had a Samurai character appear, much less a character from Japan, so I’m using the opportunity of working in this new universe to try something new.

The character is an interesting blend—he wears a Western coat, reminiscent of the era, but has it half open, which is a very Japanese style. I wanted to show off a bit of his wild nature with the design. We are still working out the Ofuda concept, so please bear with us.

It’s kind of ironic—I was able to come up with Miriam, Johannes, and Gebel’s name rather easily, but landing on a good Japanese name ended up taking a long time.

– IGA

Source: Kickstarter