An idea I had to satiate my idea of a new Splatterhouse as I cannot release anything related to the IP. I have some friends who want to help with the audio and would love for them to showcase their talents, so a new game idea was paramount for making this happen.
Setup
The first step was coming up with an idea. I wanted to pull from my own life on some ideas, and there are a lot of things still in the works, but for now the main characters name is Marcus Mercury and he finds a mask eye piece in an abondoned museum he breaks into one night due to being drunk. Once I had this idea and the names and knew I wanted to use Unity. I setup my repository and got to work. Starting my inital push on Oct 6th at apparently 3:20 in the morning. Aside from these tools another great tool I've been using is Claude.ai and ChatGPT for code segments and refactoring.
Main Menu
The original idea for the main menu was just a full mask in a glass display case as it takes place in a museum. This changed over time slightly to the full mask in an exploding view on a alter in the museum. There are basic buttons on the bottom right of the screen such as play, options, how to play and quit.
Combat System
My first focus was the combat system. I knew getting this feeling right was paramount. I spent days getting the right feel down for how it is now. Scrapping whole segments and changing it over and over again until it felt good. Now it has a hitstop that activates on strikes and camera shakes for visual feedback that feels good even without the audio implemented at this time. Which is in the works. There are light and heavy attacks done by left mouse click and left mouse hold respectively. As well as a block by holding both buttons simultaniously. On top of that you can unlock an execution technique that allows you to build energy for a kill when the enemy is low on health that spills more blood for the player to collect. These can also be done on unsuspecting enemies if smart enough to get in the right positions.
First Month
The first month went by extremely fast and I was able to implement many many systems into the game. These being the combat system, tutorial system, cutscene system, enemy health system, enemy ai, blood system, executions, desperation techniques and more. Below is a video of the first level I put together over the first month. Although its not complete it gives a good idea on how the game feels and plays for future references.