Early Access v.4 Coming April 9th - The Story of Yamai Village, Cancer as a Samurai Village

Coming to Hanako: Honor & Blade April 9th, 2020 - Early Access v.4

The story of Yamai Village, our new map - Cancer as a samurai village.

The newest map, the Yamai Village, releases on April 9th in Hanako: Honor & Blade is chalk full of atmosphere, death and a tremendous amount of personal metaphors and symbolism. It seeks to answer the artistic challenge of "What would cancer look like if it was a samurai village?" Within the theme of our game.

The Yamai clan serves as the antagonistic counterpart to the game’s namesake clan, the Hanako, who are a personification of my mother, who passed away from cancer after a long battle shortly before the project started as a college senior project in 2008. The antagonist represents cancer, death, brutality and all things bad and this new map was a canvas to explore these dark themes.

Many of our developers have lost a loved one to cancer and this map was a deeply personal expression of transforming our own grief into a visually stunning, atmospheric space that captures the theme. We live in crazy times and the takeaway from this level or our game is that there is light in the darkness, and a path to overcome the challenges of our lives.



When I work on these maps I make a lot of internal goals for what I want to “feel” when I look at them, play them and the sort of pathos or triumph of every map. I wanted to feel what it felt like to stare the disease that took the one closest to me, right in the face and explore those emotions artistically within the world of Hanako. From every crate and sword to the music of each map we seek to strike strong emotional chords.



On the other hand, should you play as the Hanako clan on this online battlefield, you have a chance to face the Yamai and bring peace, beauty and hope back to the world. As much as it’s ridden with death and pain it’s a chance to stand up to it, acknowledge it and come to terms with it. At the same time, it’s a video game and if you don’t care about the symbolism at all we still have to deliver a fun, balanced play experience and that’s what I think we did a great job.



Technically speaking we wanted to push the envelope more with Unreal Engine 4. We’ve been working on this for a long time so we wanted this map to set the standard for what you all can expect from Hanako. We wanted to make better use of Unreal’s superior volumetrics and visual effects, physically-based rendering and other features that make UE4 the best engine on the planet to make games with. We wanted to make cool Blueprint tools like our hanging ropes and give the map more context with end-of-match cinematics that give epic finality to winning or losing a match.




It was a really challenging map to make, many of you saw every bit of it get made live on our Twitch dev streams and I’d like to thank all of you all for bouncing ideas back and forth and pushing me to make Yamai Village the best map in our game and some of the best art and fun gameplay our development team has ever made. We’re super excited to bring this Early Access v.4 patch to the world with much more polished combat and a bunch of other features on top of this new Map. We hope to see you all April 9th and after as we near release later this year (hopefully).





Other Patch Features

• Refined combat attack animations and reactions.
  
• Item Store (content will be low at first while we finish core game still)
  
• New Map - Yamai Village
  
• End of Match Cinematics for both team's on campaign maps.
  
• Massive improvements to stability, gameplay bugs and other things.

Sobre este jogo

Official Discord: http://discord.gg/playhanako
This is the best place for events, finding matches/other players and dev talk.




Journey Across Feudal Japan, on a symbolic campaign representing a personal trial of life and death of a lost loved one. Experience multiple levels and game modes to bring peace or chaos, in (up to) 24 player online battles.


Choose Warriors destined to decide the future of Japan: The Kenshi (Swordsman), Naginatashi (Pikeman), Ite (Archer) or Ninja (Assassin). All featuring their own style of combat, movement and weaponry.


Master Combat through discovery of different attacks, abilities and combos. Our combat system features multiple offensive stances driven by your movement, defensive techniques (such as the grappling hook) and abilities (ranging from acrobatic combos to multi-enemy sweeps to multi-hit combos).



What kind of gameplay is this game offering?
We plan to offer a multiplayer experience with several modes of gameplay taking familiar elements and expanding them to fit the game's backstory and to introduce fun and engaging new experiences. Combat is based on your movement direction and supplemented by abilities ranging from strong stunning dashes, to multi-hit combos and Master level abilities.

Any customization for the different character classes?
We are planning on adding some customization to the characters & weapons. Like all things this will be determined by effort needed/budget. We will likely add weapon skins before characters since our content team is limited.

Will the game have any single-player gameplay?
Co-op Vs. AI Mode launching In Early Access v.3 (Apr 5, 2019) will be playable solo. The tutorial is single-player and you can play any map with/against AI.

Are you planning on bringing the game to other platforms?
Other systems is something we would like to strive for. If we can do it, what other systems we would go onto are still "up in the air" questions. Our first and foremost goal is making this game the best it can be for Steam.

What languages will this game be in?
Well English first and foremost but we plan to do at least 3-4 others. In fact we put out a survey to collect answers from you as to what language do you play your games in which you can fill out at language.hanakogame.com

Where can I get more information about the game?
We always welcome feedback/questions. If you post them, we will answer as promptly as possible. Here are just a few ways to get in contact with us

Official Site: playhanako.com
Official Discord: http://discord.playhanako.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/playhanako
Twitch: twitch.tv/hanakogame
Facebook: facebook.com/playhanako