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Hi man, thanks for writing this up.

Purity was a design goal from the start so I'm really glad you picked up on that. I wanted to make a game that was easy to learn and felt intuitive, but with a high skill ceiling.

You're right about the Master AI, that one is borderline a joke of mine since I wanted to make an insane challenge. The AI works via a series of timers that determine the frame on which it is allowed to act, and the higher those timers the easier it is to beat. Without the timers the AI can pretty much counter you perfectly and defeating it becomes more about finding blind-spots in my own code. I think the master can respond to any threat or opportunity within like 4 frames or something.

I initially made this game so I could have something new to play with a friend, but once I put it online I found the vast majority of players didn't have the setup for local co-op and instead fought the computer, which led to a few new features like the survival mode and a few AI re-writes. Designing AI for this game is tricky because of the simple design - you find one single mistake and punish it, and so the AI needs to make enough mistakes to feel fair without falling for the same tricks every single time. It's why some AI fights can go on for so long and feel spammy as you try to find the sweet spot, and why the lower difficulties are so easy to beat. I could probably add some kind of new system under the hood like 'pressure', to make the AI gradually make more mistakes if you are aggressive.

>What sort of tweaks or game play changes have you had on your mind lately in terms of combat ?

Currently I've got a mini-update in the works after a long hiatus. Someone below asked for keyboard-only multiplayer the other day and I remembered I'd already promised that like a goddamn year ago, so that feature is coming soon, along with some improvements to keyboard-only controls in general. I'll probably add a new background or something too since I like to have some eye-candy with each update, even if it's small.

In the long run I'm not totally sure. The game has always been a hobby of mine, which is a great way to develop since there's no stress and no pressure to update a game everyone plays for free. It really helps to prevent burnout which has happened to several of my projects before. The bad part is that updates are inconsistent, but as a result the updates I do make are driven by pure inspiration and every time I think I'm done with it, I end up coming back with some little piece of tech I suddenly want to add.

I guess the shove might need some work? I don't have a lot of data on how useful it actually is for players but it seems like a fairly risky maneuver at times and whenever the AI does it and misses you've basically got a free kill.

>Will there ever be mod tools to inject things like custom stages or music?

GMS isn't really equipped for traditional modding, but you got me thinking I might be able to add a custom background/music folder and load content from there. The background one would theoretically be quite easy to make and I could add a template image in the folder to establish the ground level, resolution, etc.

>Will there be a way to save color options ?

Sure, I could add that to the current ini that autosaves. I was thinking for the longest time I'd like to tweak the colour options anyway since everyone seems to default to the hottest pinks and most nuclear greens and it hurts my soul to look at it.

>Will there be alternative control layouts ?

In the short term I mentioned the new keyboard options. I'd like to add custom keybinds but I'll have to gut the main menu and start from scratch. It's a mess of spaghetti code right now and changing setup stuff is a complete nightmare. Just adding a couple more pre-set schemes was bad enough.

>What do you think of a short and quick stab attack that is triggered by holding that back button ? That would be a fourth attack that is faster and shorter ranged than the Low Vertical Attack but is also blocked by neutral sword height.

It's worth a thought. As MajorFlop mentioned, I always saw katanas as slicing weapons without any use for thrusts, but I was also thinking that a thrust with a katana would still slice along it's edge. I'll mull it over (probably for a good long time).

>Would you be okay with a First Cut reddit ?

Of course, though I'm not so sure it'd get much traffic. :)

>Would you consider using Rollback Netcode and GGPO for online matches ?

I'd love to, but I don't know the first thing about network programming and the game would need re-written to account for delta-time and all the latency-management stuff that goes with networking. If I ever did get that far you could be sure that I'd put the game on Steam and actually try to promote it instead of just letting it sit on here.