What’s up Samurai, Ethos here with our State of the Game for June 2021.

I know it has been a little while since the last update, so I wanted to take a moment to deliver some good news. In my 2021 Roadmap video, I laid out an initial plan for development goals for 2021. I gave some ambitious goals for us to achieve and for the most part we are still on track.

One big goal I wanted to hit earlier this year was a new demo. Last year we released our Gauntlet demo which allowed you all to try out Samurai Zero's movement mechanics. We planned out our next demo to focus on our combat system. Due to some unforeseen circumstances, it took a little bit longer than I originally estimated (as usual with game development), but I am proud to announce that we are ready for our first ever multiplayer playtest!

Introducing: DUEL!

This month, we plan to run our first ever online multiplayer demo weekend. This will be your first opportunity to get your hands on Samurai Zero and play through the gameplay loop of the game. This gameplay loop will be of our 1v1 game mode, Duel, using our favorite samurai mascot, Ryder. We will be dropping even more information on the dates and additional details of this playtest in the coming days so, make sure you keep an eye out.

If you are interested in playing in this playtest, go on over to our game’s steam page and there you can directly sign up to play.

Wraith

As we close out on this chapter of development, we begin a new one. We have shown you all from the start the building relationship between Ryder and Wraith. While Ryder has been the first playable Samurai we wanted to work on, we feel like he is in a good spot as of right now and now is the time to move on to our stealth ninja friend. In these next couple months, our next main focus is bringing an entirely new character into the game.

The Dev team has already spent a lot of development time building out the foundation for our character system and creating Wraith's brand new character design and model. With all our initial pre-production tasks completed, we move forward with the fun of now bringing Wraith to life. As you can guess, Wraith will have a different style of attacks and abilities while still retaining the base movement and combat you experience with Ryder. Look forward to new behind the scenes update on his development process.

Feedback

For the past month, the team has been taking private feedback for the demo and a common note we have received is how much potential Samurai Zero has. We believe we have something special here and we are excited to allow a great amount of people to try it for themselves. Of course with that comes a bigger pool of feedback and expectations. I look forward to hearing everyone's thoughts of the demo and any constructive criticism that can help further improve it. As I have said before, we always want to be transparent with our community on development, so after the playtest is complete, we will have a Q&A answering questions and feedback items about it. Looking forward to seeing you all in the playtest. 🙂

#Always Forward

Ethos and the Samurai Zero Dev Team