Ecrazeus Castle · v220, public · first seen
Heya!
Happy Halloween! A... content update(?!) has been released for Ecrazeus Castle!
A new course, Halloween, can be played in Quickplay!
The story premise: after the destruction of the Wizamart Flagship store by Ecrazeus during the events of her Expert course, Wizamart downscaled severely, and everyone was kinda depressed to some extent, and decided to have a Halloween party. But suddenly, Hugo, the dragon you fought during the Expert course, (somehow) survived, reverted back to his human form and then... got kidnapped by the unknown force, the one you supposedly beat in the Expert course. Ecrazeus seeks to free him, and the others are tagging along for the ride, hoping they could get something for the business..
This course is a bit unusual. For one, it is a remix course, so it's mostly reusing existing maps and changing a few things about them, picking and choosing maps from all three courses. The mechanics are closer to the Beginner course, as there is no shop after a set amount of rooms, you keep going untilt the time runs out.
Also, the dungeon, due to the remixed nature of it all, plays a bit differently, so don't be surprised if you feel like you're on a scavenger hunt for enemies with no exit door, that's intended.
Oh, there's a remixed track of the usual track, Floating, by Arno Cyrus! I did ask him out of the blue while he was apparently busy, but he was really nice enough to come through for me on such short notice.
The more important element of this course is the...
To quote a master, who knows far more than I ever could: "Tits are life, ass is hometown", from Kenichiro Takaki, the producer of Senran Kagura. I will try to follow in their footsteps.
In this course, and only this course (for now?), you are equipped with new halloween outfits for each of the 4 playable characters (and you can't change outfits (for now?) in this course). Because the business is so bad, these outfits are unbelievably fragile (and the crew got a bit of weight so that didn't help).
Each hit from an enemy attack will reduce the durability of the outfit. At milestones of 50 and 0 durability, the outfit will tear partially.
Here's the important part: clothing damage has no effect on combat. HOWEVER, clothing damage has a massive impact on scoring.
When your outfit is not torn at all, every enemy KO scores you +3 to the multiplier... but the actual score you get from foes is reduce to 0!
At each stage of clothing damage, the multiplier bonus per KO reduces by 1 (so +2, then +1, then finally +0), while the score per KO lessens it's penalty (so x0.5, then x1, then... x2?!)
The goal of this course is to gather as much multiplier as possibl- wait, don't go doing a no-hit run, for you'll never actually cash out the score! The fanservice is mandatory and the optimal strategy!!!
The state of your multiplier/score bonus and the clothing durability, are indicated at the bottom left of the screen. But you can also pay attention to your heroine's outfit, that works too.
This course doesn't use the usual foes. Each one has been slapped a random attack that felt both right and wrong from another foe (or boss), given a different palette, and now it's a different enough experience. I had someone complain about the bees and the bats, so I'll gladly reveal in this course only that:
The bats are now anti-aerial foes that thow those balls of light that the golem foe does in Expert course. They were useless there, and they are useless here too!
The (robot) bees do not deal contact/melee damage, but instead will fire the robot's laser attack when it's ready to strike.
Additionally, I'm happy to say that the weird shadow monster in the dungeon of Expert course appears here as a common enemy, and has an even more annoying attack, and will be a strong threat to both your life and your clothing.
You can access the Halloween course from the start, but I'd highly recommend playing the first three courses first. The best way to describe this course would be like a ROM hack, so it will be cheaper than the main game.
Even though Steam added the achievements categories, this update doesn't have any new achievements or "secrets". However, completing the course will unlock two undisclosed secrets.
A new character (with only one outfit (for now?))
The ability to use the halloween outfits in other modes. However, they won't take clothing damage outside of the Halloween course (for now?)
This was built with the latest version of the RPG Developer Bakin engine.
While this isn't really (normally) noteworthy, they did mention that RPG Developer Bakin games should now be... officially compatible with Steam Deck?
Before you run to your Deck... it'll be unlikely to fix the performance issues on it. But, I can't test it anymore since, well, I sold my Deck during the tail end of development to fund the remaining translations. (Yes, I was beyond broke and the new job I just got was one week late in the first payment).
Maybe wait for people to confirm if it's playable enough before purchasing it (if you only play on Deck).
The engine also released a DirectX 12 mode, but at the time of this update, I decided to not use it, as there are still breaking issues with the mode that await fixes, so it's still running on openGL.
The entire reason this update exists is because I needed a test project to experiment with clothing damage as a whole (texture and shader wise, cut-ins, etc), as that will be the main feature of my next game. It's really hard to just do things from scratch, so one good way to get your hands moving is to implement it on an existing project and just seeing how things go.
This update wasn't planned two weeks ago, but a bit spur of the moment thinking and quick fingers led to this update.
However, that game is a... turn-based RPG. So I weirdly bit off the harder experiment using a real time action game for things like cut-ins. To clarify, this update only took about <2 weeks to make, with at least 2 weeks of IRL work taking most of the day away. Shortcuts were taken.
So, what's with the "for now?"? Well, eventually I'd like to (eventually) expand this clothing damage feature (at least cosmetically) to the main game... but that will involve a tedious process of rebuilding the VRoid models with their full body (a lot of current models have parts of their body omitted), re-assign the materials, actually draw the destruction maps per material, etc... There's also something else or two I'd like to do in a future update, but, it depends on upcoming circumstances...
This is a free update, a bit done hurriedly to release on Halloween. There will be bugs, and unfortunately the buggiest part is the fanservice cut-ins that happen having incorrect camera angles. I'll try to get them fixed when I have the time... If there are game breaking issues, revert to an older version using Game Versions & Betas and report the bug on the forums.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy!
Happy halloween!
| Meringue Rouge
| Depot | New manifest | Previous manifest |
|---|---|---|
| 4106271 | 7286969516137128232 | — |