Gameplay Features news - Blade Symphony

Hey guys! The response from the last few updates and our announcement had been really tremendous. Blade Symphony was recently featured on Podcast 17, UserCreated.org, Planet Half-Life, and got a mention on Rock Paper Shotgun!

I also posted the link to our trailer on Reddit which got a ton of interesting reactions.

The goal of our trailer was never to show off actual gameplay, being a teaser trailer and all. However there's been a plethora of rumors and assumptions about the mod that I wish we can just move past.

In the spirit of keeping the community updated on what we're doing, I present to you a gameplay feature demonstration video below.

One thing I do want to address was the comments aimed at the animations since the teaser trailer. Comparing us to Vindictus is of no help since they are an established game company complete with a motion capture studio. Whereas, we had no choice but to hand animate everything.

The other issue was the recording process for the teaser trailer was full of pitfalls. We recorded with our "slash-stop", a technique of freezing animation during the moment of impact, turned on, however during demo-playback we discovered that it was best to turn them off for aesthetic reasons. Unfortunately this meant that the demos had the slash-stop information already in the physics, causing bizarre sliding-around animations that you saw.

Anyone who's worked with the Source SDK will also tell you the engine is not friendly with third-person animation and network code. This is also compounded with the problem because certain animation bugs cause the player to skip an animation but they would still move. Ouch. So yeah, that's the next thing I'm tackling.

But yes! Tell your friends about Blade Symphony. Link to moddb, or better yet, punyhumangames.com. We also have a forum which you can ask the developers questions. I lurk there and I may just pop in to reply to any questions you might have.

See you, Space Samurai.

~M

PS:
Upon seeing the movie render I have the feeling that my voice-over audio might not be loud enough. Please let us know if there's an issue with the audio, as it's 5am in the morning and I'm short a pair of headphones from devapalooza so I can't check the audio volume. If it's an issue I'll definitely re-render and re-upload the video.