🎮Demo launches on April 19 🎮 Sign up for a public playtest🎮

[h3]Keeping that in mind, we're excited to announce a public playtest of the demo from April 5th till April 9th!

To take part in the playtest, simply sign up on Steam by clicking this button of the game's demo page:[/h3]





Since the announcement is big, we wanted to tell you about something equally important and interesting. So in today’s update, we will shed light on what actually makes Akatori special - the staff.

The game concept originally stemmed from a desire to experiment with staff mechanics. The main inspiration came from Switch Axe and Charge Blade from the Monster Hunter series: both weapons have distinct combat styles that can be switched on the fly. In Akatori, we wanted to go even further by making the staff a weapon, a tool for platforming, and a key to solving puzzles at the same time. The Metroidvania genre was added later but fit naturally with the existing core mechanics.

Our Monster Hunter weapon inspirations (sorry for the awful collage, but it's always better to have a picture than not, right?)

Since then, the staff has undergone lots of iterations. For instance, at one point, it was the player's "HP," i.e. the first hit on the player would knock the staff out of their hands, and if the player didn't manage to retrieve it, the next hit would be fatal. The retrieval process was then manual; the staff couldn't just be recalled back across the entire map.

The oldest iteration we could find, dated back to the age of dinosaurs (actually 2018)

Looking back, not much has actually changed since the initial concept: now we aim to center the entire game around the staff, where it plays a crucial role in combat, platforming, and puzzles.

In combat, we can switch between styles, where fists are quick close-range attacks, and the staff is slower but can stun enemies and has a greater distance. Plus, staff can be thrown as a long-range attack.
Throwing or recalling staff cancels any long animations and allows you to chain together combos that would be impossible without this mechanic.

The staff and fists share a common basic moveset (a series of three strikes, jump, roll, etc.), but everything we get later on will differentiate them more and more.

The very basic fist and staff combos

In platforming, the staff can be stuck into surfaces (including hazards like spikes) to bounce off it, thrown in the air for a mini-double jump, or used to cancel the limit on the number of hits in the air.

Again, the very basic platforming (never make writers record your gameplay)

In puzzles, we can use staff to reach interactive objects that are inaccessible without it, or use the stuck staff to hold down a pressure plate or button.

Guess what? Yeah, the very basic puzzle, you already know how it goes

We aim to cater to both regular players and those who like to "break" games. Akatori has a high skill ceiling, with many high-level mechanics that are interesting to discover. Ideally, we aim for players to initially beat the game "normally," but by the end realize how much their understanding of the mechanics has improved and to replay everything with a new perspective. However, if you're just playing for chill and fun, let this paragraph not intimidate you: in fact, all these words are just about giving room for experimentation and a bunch of mechanics to discover.

Akatori: Chapter One will feature all the basic staff mechanics, but we plan to further develop them and add separate upgrades for the staff in the full game: typically in modern Metroidvanias, you tailor your playstyle using talismans, but Akatori will have separate swappable upgrades for both Mako and the staff. For example, we want to add different behavior for the staff when thrown or recalled: it could damage enemies on its way back or create an explosion where it was stuck. We also plan to introduce staff-based magical attacks, currently dubbed Theurgy, but we'd better discuss all of this in more detail some other time :)

Thank you very much for your attention, and be sure to wishlist both Akatori and Chapter One if this got you excited!


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