With only 4 days remaining in the Kickstarter that you should definitely kick into; the team had put out a video on their developer youtube channel with lead developer Koji Igarashi playing a very basic build of the game, showing off gameplay of Miriam killing some monsters. Mr. Igarashi provided insight into his vision and talks briefly about features he’d like implemented and what his method of approach when it comes to developing Bloodstained is in regards to his team.
In the video, Igarashi talks to Yuji Natsume of Inti Creates about the walking animation and how speed affects the feeling of exploration, with a necessity to create a speed where you don’t blitz through rooms, but don’t slog through slowly. As shown, Miriam walks in a very smooth animation cycle and has a bit of floatiness to her jumps, which is a nice but a little slow paced. Something Igarashi mentions near the end is how he’d ideally like the walking animation to be changed to a slight jog instead of a casual jaunt. This reflects back to his approach in Symphony of the Night and later iterations where the character were always jogging around the castle, it definitely changed the pace of the game when compared to the older Castlevania’s where the characters would walk determinedly around the environment.
Natsume mentions how being in a very early stage of development, it’s uncertain how the camera angle should be, currently, it’s panned out a bit with the floor being slightly angled towards the camera so you can see the surface being treaded upon. Ideally Igarashi mentions that this is ideal as it helps with integrating with the world and environment; helping to create a parallax scrolling effect that works with creating a polished feel. Thankfully Igarashi has basically confirmed there wouldn’t be extremely precise jumps especially if the tilted floor is kept.
One last big thing Igarashi made sure to mention was how he appreciates the amount of detail his programmers have when they work alongside the designers when it comes to creating this world with all of its unique environmental features. Small details including light rays beaming into the room and scrolling, cracks with critters running around and the like. It looks like the game will be very colorful, and not in just the literal sense but it’ll have so much little detail that makes the game incredibly fun for people who want to just throw themselves into the world and experience it. I’m greatly looking forward to Bloodstained and the fact it has also just hit its stretch goal for some orchestral pieces means the music is going to be superb too! If you have yet to check out Bloodstained, please do!