Hey folks.

I'm a very lonely person. Most weeks I don't socialize with anyone but one individual who's twice my age and has nothing in common with me. My phone gathers dust. This has been my life now for a few years. I figure my situation will continue to degrade as I continue to age. And i'm not handling it very well.

That's my excuse. I feel like I owe you as much. I think I could have been done with my game project by now, but I don't have the kind of support I used to have. I find it hard to stay motivated. I miss my brothers, I miss my friends. They're close by, but they don't think about me. I wonder why.

It'll get done. There's not much left but it needs to be done right. I don't really know what right is anymore but i'll feel it when it's there.

Delay

I said that I had hoped to be done with Sanguine 3 this summer, but that won't be the case. Perhaps early next year would be a decent conservative guess. I've just been way too slow these past few months and I don't know what my deal is. Burnout, maybe?

Blood

I thought i'd talk a little bit about blood in my Sanguine games. Blood seems an important subject matter in a game about a vampire.

-= Sanguine =-

In the original game, Eleanor had 100 blood points in a bar that was visually segmented in two. Each human drained would yield 50 points of blood. After a few seconds, any blood over 50 would deplete away. This would act as a sort of health buffer, incentivizing the player to always want to drain more humans to fortify their defense, even if they hadn't been damaged.

While successful, it's somewhat contradicting. It's a game about stealth. Encouraging the player to absorb shots and rush through humans somewhat goes against that.

-= Sanguine 2 =-

In Sanguine 2, I tried for something more simplistic and gave the player three distinct blood points. The depletion effect was removed. Anything that damaged you caused 1 damage, and since Eleanor has to go negative to die, you had four hit points.

Because Sanguine 2 was more of an action game, there were segments without humans and a player could be stranded without any blood. Blood orbs could be picked up to revitalize the player's health and speed, except there was one problem I didn't realize until after the fact: picking up orbs was faster and more fun than sucking blood out of humans.

Each human was worth one blood. I wanted the player to have to earn full health and try to hold on to it. If you are fighting a human and take a hit, but manage to grab them anyway and feed, you break even on health exchange. But it takes time to abduct a human, run away, suck blood, and run back two or three times. I could have made humans worth three blood a piece, but then every encounter results in a full heal to Eleanor. What a mess.

-= Sanguine 3 =-

Eleanor has nine blood points in Sanguine 3. Draining a human yields three blood, while blood orbs only grant the one. Imbalance solved. But wait, there's more!

When hit, all of Eleanor's blood is ejected out of her body in a 180 degree spray. Each blood point becomes a collectable blob that sticks to whatever surface it hits. In theory, the player can recover 100% of their blood loss, but in practice, due to the complexity of the stage or enemies, the player will often lose about half of their supply.

Speed has always been a binary effect; if you have blood, you go at the fast speed and if you don't have blood you go at the slow speed. Because the player has blood most of the time, blood speed feels "normal" while bloodless speed feels like a curse. Which is intended, of course. You are meant to feel like a blood starved vampire through the gameplay.

But in this game, blood no longer grants speed by itself. Speed is only gained through feeding from humans for a period of time. This, like the first game, always gives the player an incentive to feed even if they are at maximum health because they want that speed. And speed scales; not by value but by duration. In the current formula, the player gets about 2.5 seconds of speed at 1/3rd health, and 14 seconds at maximum health (could be very subject to change).

So in effect, bloodless speed is the new normal speed. Blood haste is the rarity, granting the player a rush from the enhanced speed and attack rate. Once again, I hope to make the player feel like a blood starved vampire, but using positive reinforcement instead of negative and satisfying the intuition that more blood is more speed. Any blood collected during the blood rush effect automatically refreshes it to the new maximum.

And then there's slime. Slime is a bad kind of blood. While it does function as health, it also prevents the player from obtaining more blood or any blood rush effect. It fills your blood gauge on top of current blood, only overwriting blood if the bar has no more empty space. If the player gets a full green slime bar and adds +1 slime, they explode. Death.

The only way to be rid of slime is to get hit by a non-slime attack, causing all of the player's resources to fly out and stick to the walls. How goth, how emo to require the player to cut themselves to be free from a curse! While blood is instantly collected on contact, slime turns into an egg and hatches 2 seconds later into a randomized critter that scurries about the stage. If it touches the player, they regain the slime again. But these creatures can be destroyed with Eleanor's attack or simply be jumped over to evade them.

Overall, I feel really pleased with the new mechanics. Eleanor achieves my paradoxical standard of being highly durable or very fragile based on the enemy and the environment. Blood is more of an addiction as it ever was, and i'd hate to be the son of a bitch who has to design a game around it.

I'm not fond of doing updates and progress reports. The reality is that sometimes a project will fail to take off or things will change so much that I feel that I would fail expectations. But I also doubt many people will even know about this game and that I should post something so folks know that it's alive.

In the wake of a failed game project, I decided to start building Sanguine 3 in Godot. Godot is free to use and, supposedly, pixel game friendly.

I didn't know it at the time, but I had become a master at Flash. The speed in which I could iterate and implement content was refined over a decade of experience, of which I am sorely lacking now. Godot is a capable engine, but it is also very crude even in comparison to Flash. There are many aspects to Godot that, for instance, just doesn't have any kind of undo function. External resources must be manually reimported when changes are made. It's free, I can't complain. Although I kinda just did.

I describe development of any game into two sections. The first is the experimental phase where I just build a character, features, abilities... that kinda stuff. The second is where I build out levels and bosses. I'm well into phase two and am currently trying to build a room in the catacombs that features parellax scrolling columns in the foreground that the player can be hidden behind and that humans can be hidden behind. As you move, so do the columns, so the player needs to adjust their speed to be hidden or pull humans out of hiding. I just caught a bug where a human flagged as hidden denies a trigger on their movement timers, causing them to walk in one direction forever...

Anyway. It's hard to guess when the game will be done, but I speculate that it will be the upcoming summer.

Gifv Link (Imgur)

Might delete later, idk.

https://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/a2276abef590645ba83eb85ba53ffd09

Dated January 14, 2014.  This is Sanguine 2 as it was before it was halted for 2 years, and what my video games tend to look like early into development.

- The blue orbs on the loading screen are taken from a Gardener game I never completed... I don't know why that stuff was there, probably little reminders to do something related to them later.

- Many levels do not have ends and you must reload the page and reset the game to get back to the overworld.

- Attack and jump are different buttons.

- You must press up and attack to throw the chain, and it can only be thrown upwards.  For some reason, the hook is gold?  In a previous iteration, the chain spun around Eleanor, similar to Yoshi's aiming mechanic in Mario World 2 Yoshi's Island when Yoshi aims an egg, but I found that version to be even more difficult to control and scrapped it.  Plus, hooking into terrain based on a rotating hook made you feel like spiderman... fun, but undermined a big portion of the game.

- You must press up to abduct humans in this version.

- If you abduct a human and press a direction and attack, you throw them in the given direction instead of draining them.  Humans can be thrown into other humans.  Scrapped because it's kind of easy to accidentally throw them, and I thought weaponizing human bodies might trivialize parts ot the game.

- The Scythe weapon drains blood...?

- Humans have a particle effect system showing how they detect the player.  The scan comes out from the player instead of the humans, since I found that more often than not, the player was closer to a wall then humans were and it would result in fewer hitTests (and in theory, may improve performance).

- Souls give Eleanor a shoddy form of invincibility.

- Humans have an absurdly fast fire rate.

- Clicking on the upper right hand corner gives you the pause menu, complete with circle buttons that do stuff. From the right, the first tan set change the background, the next set changes the footstep sounds, the next turn blood on and off, the dark green button toggles the particle effects quality and the last button will turn you into a yellow block, letting you quickly move around a level while invincibile when you unpause.