If you're a fan of side-scrolling action games—and I have an inkling that many of you are—we've got some excellent news for you in this month's update. I'll let IGA tell you about it.



It's me, IGA.

For this month's update, we have an incredible support who will be joining the Bloodstained team. Can you guess who? It's WayForward!

That's right, WayForward, the makers of Shantae! As you may already know, they are top-tier when it comes to side-scrolling action games. There is even a staff member who previously worked on one of my projects, which is incredibly encouraging.

In consideration of their past achievements, WayForward will be helping the development team realize my vision for this game. Maybe I am even more excited than everyone else - with their help Bloodstained will become an even better game.

We also have some new enemy concept art to show you. This is Cyhyreath.



Cyhyreath first appears to be crouching on the floor. Once the player approaches her, she will fly around and make a death shriek to attack the player.

It's a traditional gothic horror design, and I think it's lovely.

I was talking with the team just before writing this comment and, with WayForward's help, they have been busy helping to improve the game and fix any bugs that pop up.

Speaking of which, there's a really tough one that’s making the game crash that needs to be fixed before the game reaches everyone, so we are scything through them all.

Thank you, everyone, for your continued support!



As always we've got collected some of your fanart to show off. If you'd like to join the parade, make sure to tag your art #IGAVANIA or #bloodstained to help us find it. (Maybe we can get some Bloodstained/Shantae crossover art after today's announcement?)


nealakuma


illusta


mildkat



We cannot be happier to have WayForward on the project. Best known for the Shantae series, they bring decades of development experience to help us bring Bloodstained to the finish line.

As for Cyhyreath, she’s just one of many amazing enemies that are in various levels of completion behind the scenes. We want to make sure that there are plenty of surprises on launch day, so while we will show off some of the villains IGA has waiting, we certainly won’t show them all.

To address the ‘when’ questions that pop up each time we don’t announce a release date, I’ll point to my comment in our previous Kickstarter Update. As soon as we have a concrete release date, we will let everyone know. With WayForward on the project, we get closer to that announcement.

Thanks for being with us as we continue to work on Bloodstained!

Jason Ryan, a.k.a. “Question”
Sr Community Manager – 505 Games

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/iga/bloodstained-ritual-of-the-night/posts/2319659

Copy of the update is below, please go to the link for full update with images!

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We've got some development updates for you—along with an extremely mood-lit look at IGA's Halloween costume—so let's get right to it!


Happy Halloween! IGA here. I am delivering this message to you exactly as you see me here in the photo.


By the way, I got all this in Akihabara.

This time we would like to introduce a new enemy. This is Killer Barber, the murderous hairdresser. Well... the name really speaks for itself. He uses his scissor arms to climb across the ceiling and swiftly attack towards the player. This character can also—well, I should leave it at that for now.


Our staff has been working on placing enemies based on difficulty level.

When I see the Nightmare Mode enemy placements, I always wonder if it's okay to make a game this difficult. I’ve worked on enemy placement in games before, so I understand that the person making those decisions becomes more and more immune to difficulty level over time. I think that’s what’s happening to the team now—they’re getting a little vicious with it…

We've also been working on the models—we've been meticulously adjusting each character. In particular, we're focused on facial features. Gebel is looking more and more handsome these days...


Every day we fight through the challenges of development, but we know we're working to create a game worthy of reaching everyone's hands. Thank you for your continued support.


Been working diligently through Inktober? Hoping to find yourself in a future fanart spotlight? Tag your art #bloodstained or #igavania on your platform of choice and we'll find it! (If you need a prompt... check out that updated Gebel.)

ADSouto


Happy Halloween, Army of the Night!

We hope all of you have some fun Halloween plans for the coming weekend (because it’s weird to celebrate Halloween on the first weekend of November). As you can imagine, Halloween is one of our favorite times of year. I am getting out my own favorite costume for this year’s company Halloween party.


We hope that today’s updates are as exciting for you as they are for us! The Killer Barber is a particularly nasty enemy. He doesn’t politely walk towards you, he quickly climbs around the walls and ceiling to attack from various angles. Weapon and shard choices really begin to matter when facing these more complex foes. I haven’t had the pleasure of fighting him in the game yet, but he’s going to be a fun one.

The before and after of Gebel is a small taste of the visual updates that have been happening behind the scenes.

We know everyone is waiting to see a more comprehensive view of the game’s visual improvements. A lot of that work is still in progress and not ready to be revealed. We are going to wait until the look of the game is mostly locked before we share.

The same applies for our release date. The number one question right now is “When?” and the second most popular is “approximately when?”. Until we hit certain internal development milestones we are not going to discuss the release date because there are still variables; we do not want to give out a date and then change it. Even saying Spring/Summer/Fall/Winter or 1st/2nd/3rd/4th quarter would result in confusion if we had to release slightly later or earlier than announced, or at the start or end of one of those cycles. We do have a target date internally that we feel confident about, but until we can nail it down, we will wait to reveal it.

I want to thank all of our backers and fans for your patience as work progresses on the game. The final game is going to be worth it.

Jason Ryan, a.k.a. “Question”

Sr Community Manager – 505 Games

Hey, all.

The latest update is here. Our goal going forward is to have the updates live on the last Thursday of each month.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/iga/bloodstained-ritual-of-the-night/posts/2299212

You should go to the actual page to get the full text and the Fan Art section, but here is the text from the update:



As we creep into autumn we've got a new development update for you from IGA, filled with news about what the team's been working on. Let's get right to it:


Hi everyone, IGA here.

We would like to give a report of our current development progress.

Lately, the team has been working on the lighting of the environment and the lip-sync of the characters.

We’re aiming for a 2D-style look and feel in this game, and we have special techniques in place to achieve it, but they also create additional developmental challenges for us. However, after a number of adjustments, as well as finding the right lighting angle and contrast, we finally feel that we’ve found the aesthetic we were searching for.

Recently we’ve also found a new method for the fog that is less computationally expensive for the environment. My slogan - always pursue more beautifully, and more lightly.

As for the lip-syncing, we’ve made adjustments to the height of the mouths, which were too large before. Right now we've only adjusted Miriam and Dominique, but it's looking good so far! We will continue to work on the rest of the characters the same way.

We’re also happy to announce the launch of the Beta Backer Demo for our GOG backers! We didn’t want to delay the launch of the demo while we completed preparations for its launch on GOG, but now we are able to distribute GOG versions of the demo to the people who chose it as their platform. We will continue to support the main game for GOG from here on, so please do not worry.

In addition to the adjustments I’ve told you about, we’re actually also working on the final boss right now. There were many issues and challenges that we are facing using the original design, but I guess that's pretty common for us. We have been developing new solutions each day and now we’re coming close to creating the final boss that everyone is hoping for. This will be the last time we talk about the final boss until the game's release—please look forward to it!

Fangamer note: If you chose GOG for your Bloodstained final game platform, we'll be assigning GOG demo keys to your backer management page tonight. If you don't have that link handy, you can get it back on our survey resender page.



Lots of great new stuff in the fanart feeds this month! If you'd like to be part of a future fanart spotlight, tag your work with #IGAVANIA or #bloodstained on your social media platform of choice and we'll find it.


Stormhead - https://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=69439464 -


ひより- https://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=68950186


∇ - https://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=70525671



Hello, everyone!

You may not have seen me around, so I’ll introduce myself. My name is Jason Ryan and I have the privilege to be a part of the Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night team as a Senior Community Manager from 505 games.

I’d like to thank everyone for their feedback on the recent Beta Backer Demo. We are excited to see the enthusiasm and excitement everyone has for the game and your willingness to let us know what we can do to make the game the best it can be before launch.

In the weeks following the new demo’s release we received hundreds of suggestions, feedback threads and bug reports on Reddit, the Forums and on Steam. All of these player-made posts were compiled and sent to both the 505 and Artplay production teams. From there the lists are prioritized and production needs and schedules established. Our goal is to make sure that when RotN ships, it’s worth the wait.

We appreciate all of the Backers and fans who have joined us along this journey with Bloodstained. If you’d like to keep up to date on everything that is going on, be sure to join the ever-excellent Bloodstained community on Discord, Facebook, Twitter, or the forums.

Thank you.

Jason Ryan, a.k.a. “Question”
Sr Community Manager – 505 Games[/quote]