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Hey everyone! It's been a while since my last update, but I finally made it to a point where the game is no longer a prototype but a fully functional game, which is just lacking in content right now! :) In this release, I added 3 gamemodes, a new armor set, level selection (with only one level :( ), athletics, melee attacks, and an infinite amount of fixes and tweaks.

Gamemodes

• Tug-of-war: This is the core gamemode of Griefhelm. It works just like in Nidhogg, who gets the kill gets the lead and needs to run towards the goal. But that's not all, unlike Nidhogg, Griefhelm supports up to 4 players for this mode. The struggles to make this work were incredibly painful, especially handling the camera behavior and player respawn. Nevertheless, I am really happy with the results and need to hunt down any bugs you guys find ;)
• Free for all: Ignorance at its best, you are all thrown into the same screen starting a bloodbath and backstabbing your friends in their effort of blocking and strinking other opponents. Oh, a cool way of playing this is actually having one player fight another one while the others watch and whoever wins gets to fight next one. Once the match ends, the player who survived gets to start against the first one that died the match before.
• Team* skirmish: Two teams fight each other, and there is friendly fire so don't expect to thrust through your teammate to kill the opponent. However, I'll leave friendly fire as an option in the future.

* For all the team-based gamemodes players will have colored plumes on their helms to identify their team.

Full Plated Armor

There are now 4 armor sets. This was important since the game supports 4 players, therefore, having a minimum of 4 armor sets was a must!

Athletics and Melee

To avoid making the combat system useless I had to reduce the speed and jump height of the players. This is because if players were too fast and jumped too much then blocking was pointless since dodging was so much easier. So the game has more of a classic Prince of Persia approach to sidescrolling: with semi-realistic speeds and jump heights. While this fixed the combat problem, it brought up a new one: platforming. In order to achieve a bit of vertical variation in the game's movement I had to add ledge climbing and ladders, and of course design levels according to how these design elements interact with each other.

Another thing I noticed was that players were constantly getting too close. Close to a point where their sword swings wouldn't hit. To fix this, I added the fact that when two players are up close whoever attacks first performs a kick to "reset the distances" and obviously giving a slight stun to the opponent.

Level: Woods

All of the footage you see in the game is taken from the level Woods, which is the first complete level in the game. My goal is to have other 3 levels for version 0.5.

You actually read everything? :) That's awesome! Thank you so much! Make sure you download the game, try it out, and don't hesitate in giving me feedback. You could be of great influence to the outcome of this game! 'Till next time, Johnny Dale Lonack