October Update Progress 

Greetings!

It's been a while since I've posted anything regarding the Null Faint Phantomra project. 

No, it hasn't been abandoned, I'm a bit too stubborn to do that. 

Instead, I've taken what little feedback I had gotten and have used a fair bit of common sense to change some stuff around and rework some thing entirely. 

I get the impression from the first build (current build as of writing) is a bit of a confusing, gloomy tech demo.

A lack of in-game instructions was a common complaint, fair.

Here's some of the major things tackled so far.

• GUI Art Direction
• Game Performance
• Game Art Direction
• GUI Readability
• Character Animation
• Hardware Scalability
• Overly aggressive vibrations (Xbox Series Controllers)
• Overall lighting
• Mature Content options

The User Interface has been significantly overhauled (IMHO).

First, the old...crappy...terrible GUI (It really wasn't that bad but it was kinda meh).

Now, the better, cooler, smoother GUI with more options!

I've killed two massive birds with one giant mountain of a stone by redoing the GUI and have now opened the option to give the user quite a bit of customization over the game's configuration options so that they can ensure they get the best experience on their hardware. I'm still targeting Ryzen 5 2500U with Vega 8 Graphics for 720p 30fps as the bare minimum for hardware since its a slightly older config of hardware on many, many budget notebooks. But since I'm using Unity HDRP, natrually high end visuals on appropriate hardware are possible. (All screenshots here are using fairly high settings at the time of development at 1440p on an RTX 2070)

Below you can see the Graphics settings menu. I'm thinking of adding more options.

The Game's art style has been improved.

The game's art direction has been somewhat improved. This is due to more research going into lighting, environment and character style choices and some very nice updates from the anime shader asset I'm using, the RealToon Anime Shader by MJQ Studio Works, to be specific! It's pretty awesome.

Speech Box readability has been improved

The speech boxes that appear above a character's head have been reworked to be more readable from a reasonable playing distance. They also feature depth sorting based on the camera distance from the character.

Oh, yeah...enemies will talk total trash about you now. So don't feel bad about air juggling them later.

Some video clips of the updated build

You can now be stunned...

The GUI isn't garbage tier anymore.

Air shuffling and environmental damage have been slightly refined. (Air shuffling, the act of spin attacking and dodge cancelling in rapid succession.)

Kedabi's storefront is still inactive but shading and readability has been improved. (Kedabi's storefront is a part of the game plan. You're supposed to buy and modify special items using a special lore specific currency you gain from killing certain bad guys and exploring certain parts of a stage. It's not an online shop. I hate online shops, they're immersion breaking.)

The sleazy Galactic Port City of Destom is being rebuilt so that it doesn't look like a confusing 2006 era tech demo (Although thanks to the alpha state of things, it kinda still does, kill me.)

And that's just a taste of what's been done so far.

I hope to release this heavily updated and improved free demo in the upcoming months (November-December 2021). In the meantime, you can give me any suggestions or critiques you have with what you see here or with the old current demo that you can download right now. Any issues you have in the old demo will most likely have been sorted out when the new demo drops in the next deployment date. That being said, feel free to state them anyways. I have no life and am working on this project basically every day.