Child Arms News

This version of the demo comes with the following changes:

• Wide-screen first person view now available for arcade mode
  
• Fixed issue where Neutral could not strike through
  
• Enro's stamina, when the opponent hits his shield, now decreases by half of the opponent's attack power plus 30
  
• Fixed bug where UI elements would not appear if won by time out
  
• Fixed issue on the Stamina section in the Tutorial where you do not get tired even without stamina
  
• Escudo's Mid and Low Defense has been lowered: 12 > 11
  
• Defense Discipline no longer doubles your character's defense. It now increases it by half.
  
• Characters with defense less than 0 gets set to 0 in Defense discipline rather than set it to positive.
  
• Difficulty screen remaining black when victory by time out fixed
  
• Swish remaining when time out has been fixed
  
• Removed delay limitation, all disciplines delay attacks
  
• Fixed issue where music does not play when you turn it off and then on when leaving a menu back to main.
  
• Appended Stamina stats with percentage out of 800 as well as other explanations referring to health stats
  
• All instances of the word "delay" in reference to the state have been changed to windup
  
• Enro's Shield Ram now adds 20 frames of stun if used during Defense discipline
  
• Added sound effects to the menu
  
• Exiting to main menu has been changed to holding the secondary button
  
• Fixed bug where Escudo would either only stab or not attack in Master difficulty
  
• You can now end the battle in a draw
  
• Fixed bug in Arcade game over where it allowed you to continue even if you lost
  
• Charging with Defense Discipline will have your character enter Endurance state faster
  
• Sidestep cost increased from 12 to 35 and max from 240 to 800.
  
• Minor miscellaneous changes
  

Last update, I was making plans on how to deal with the newly constructed social network for Child Arms and Steam continued to trouble me. It feels completely different than what other sites are doing that I was kind of perplexed on how to continue to update the store front. As time went on, I started thinking about my life and how I feel that i have not fulfilled all that I wish to accomplish. I eventually settled on a decision.

A few months ago, I started another project. This project, while still a creative endeavor, also has a business sense to it. I just realized that I can't keep working on projects if it doesn't actually get a response. I think all of us indie devs can relate, we work for months, even years, on a game only to end up getting one or two downloads. Sometimes none. I've been through that path for the past decade or two, but now that I'm older, I can't continue to do that anymore. My life is not getting any better and constantly struggling with my projects is not going to take me anywhere. I have to make a conscience decision to create a product that will actually sell.

In comparison, Child Arms is more of a passion projects, and these don't usually sell. I am still working on making Child Arms the exception, but that's going to take time. I can still feel the potential of what Child Arms can achieve and I still dream of the day that the project finally gets traction. Yet, after a decade of trying to get my projects off the ground, I realize I need more than passion, I need so much more that I have yet to discover what it is.

But in the end of the day, I really just wish to work on the game. Marketing, getting your work out there to the public, this is a necessity, of course, but by the time I figured this out, I was so far into the project that it was too late to modify it for any way to appeal to the mainstream. This game was designed during a time when I was still going by the old philosophy of just making a good game and players will come. It is only recent that I realize that is false, and it comes from my observation of the current indie scene. There are so many amazing games being made but they have no player base. It has become apparent to me that I have to do something that stands out among the rest in order for Child Arms to get out of this predicament.

I have to figure out how to promote Child Arms properly to get the audience I need but I feel I am inadequate at this point in time to actually achieve this. I need more and I'm hoping the second project will provide the necessary resources in order to do so. Maybe even get some help in that regard because at this point in my life, I can only do so much.

That is why I decided to hold things back for now and that means that this Steam store page won't be updated for a while. It will just be the store front where players can check out the demo and wishlist the game. I will utilize Steam in the future for sure but right now I can only concentrate on the game itself. I have organize everything and some things have to be put aside.

Hopefully the future is brighter and Child Arms will be given the priority it needs, but for the time being, I have to concentrate what is best for my life and future. And in the end of the day, this being a passion project I've had for 2 decades, I just want to make the game.

I'm happy to announce the latest version of the game There have been major changes to Child Arms behind the scenes. While I and the team are getting ready to work on the next character Mayana, we have also been busy rebranding ourselves and updating our online presence. I'm currently renovating all our social sites and making plans on how to give Child Arms exposure to get a player base going. A lot of our sites have been neglected for some time and that was giving the impression that we are not active when nothing could be further from the truth. It's just that I, the creator of the game and the programmer, am in charge of everything related to Child Arms as the only others in the team are an art studio and a music composer. Everything else is on me, including promotion, and am currently rectifying that by making a plan on how to keep everything updated.

At this time, I am not actually ready to actually put anything into motion but eventually realized that the last demo had an error that kept you from starting the game. If you didn't have a prior save file, the game would not proceed to the start screen due to an oversight in the code for checking controllers. It never occurred to me that this version was in the last version of the demo which was uploaded over 2 months! Now that we've managed to make a few changes to the itch.io page, we've been getting some traffic our way and it was imperative that I upload a build that fixes that bug. The latest version, 0.3.1.2, can now run without any problems for first-timers. If you already downloaded the game before 0.3.1.0, you probably never noticed it to begin with but this new version also comes with many new additions to it that it is worth downloading.

[h2]Enro stat changes[/h2]

• Enro's special Turnaround Slash now only takes 60 stamina instead of 100.
  
• If you used his shield and the opponent attacked you, it would add 300 stamina to the combo cost, meaning that if you attacked after pulling out your shield, you would pay extra stamina. This was the reason why it felt like he didn't have much stamina to begin with. This has been removed and now you may attack after using his shield without paying a huge price in stamina.
  
• Another culprit that kept eating away at his stamina was the combo cost. This has been reduced from 25 to 20 and his stamina recovery timing has been increased by 1. This means that Enro's attacks will take less stamina and recuperate slightly faster than before.
  

[h2]Neutral Discipline[/h2]

The biggest change in this version would be the addition of Neutral Discipline, something I wanted to do for a long while. This isn't really a discipline per se, it's more like the default unaltered stats that were used for Instinct. In a way, Instinct was meant to be the neutral state but it never occurred to me to make the stats available without the automatics.


Because Neutral is just Instinct without the automatics, they share the same slot, meaning that you have to turn off Instinct in order to use Neutral. You can do this on the options menu.

[h2]Minor changes[/h2]

• For Training mode, there is now a shortcut to reset all the stats on the screen by pressing F9 and then Enter. You can also activate this through the start menu under the Pause Programming option.
  
• Sidestep no longer just takes 300 stamina away. Instead, you now start accruing 12 costs per shift in position. That means that if you sidestep for the first time, there is no cost of stamina but next time, you'll pay 12 stamina, then you pay 24, and then 36, etc. The cap to this is around the same as the original. This feature is added to keep players from misusing the sidestep but I felt that the 300 cost at the beginning was too much. This method will keep the sidestep a viable defense tool and encourage the player to use it sparingly.
  
• You can now use spaces when naming a custom color palette. This may not be a big deal but the original reason why you couldn't is that it was easier to just not allow spaces in the first place. This has to do with the way naming a color palette is done in-game, which is omitting anything but letters and numbers. I do not want to allow the use of symbols due to the way the game saves the palettes as a file so I wanted to avert compatibility issues as much as I could. However, space is one of the symbols that is allowed to be used to name files, I was just believing that it may not since I come from a time when you couldn't name a file with a space (this was like 10-15 years ago when you had to use underscore in place of space). But now I have finally gotten accustomed to using space to name files so I decided to re-code the naming function. Now all color files can have spaces in their names.
  

I am still preparing every one of my social sites but I figured itch.io was more or less done, and it was important to update the game, so I decided to give you guys a heads up on all this. Hopefully, all these changes will be beneficial in getting a player base for Child Arms.

The game has been updated to version 0.2.2.0 which include the following:

Additions:
- New song to Tutorial and Discipline training
- Weapons highlight when player is about to attack
- Outlines to shadows that you can edit
- Screen shake during attacks
- Information about outline and shadow alpha
- Chapters to tutorial
- Shortcut keys to training
- Secret password
- Time spent on game now displayed on main menu
- Opponent in Tutorial now uses second default color

Fixes:
- Escudo's stab attack now counts the recovery frames during training
- Marker doesn't go over Master difficulty point in the Difficulty screen
- Fixed oversight where Pause menu appears during victory

Bugs:
- Secondary button no longer escapes to main menu during editing of the shadow from the options menu
- Fixed escape bug from Tutorials
- Fixed In-Game option bug not returning to main menu with secondary button
- Fix bug where timer counts down in Practice
- Fixed bug where you can still select n/a in color editor for Enro
- Fixed Bug where opponent in Tutorial will twitch if hit

Welcome to Child Arms, the first of a 3 part series of sword-fighting games. This game has been in development since 2019 and after an open beta was released last year, the development of the full version of the game was put into production. Half a year after that, I am proud to announce the first demo of the game.

Right now, the game's demo only contains 2 characters and a few modes, including versus and practice. It also contains a color editor so you can play around with the color palettes. There are plans to update the demo in the coming months to include at least one mini game and extra characters to practice with.

For the next few weeks, I am attempting to spread awareness of the game so development will come to a stop for now and will resume later on. If you so far like what you see, check out the demo and join us at the Discord server where many updates will be posted on there.