ty aru, i appreciate the effort from one of my esteemed colleagues 😤
the aesthetics were kinda what i was hoping would carry the lack of polish we were able to bring with this one, it all runs and everything but as you've gathered, it needs some improvements LOL. the story is very likely that a war was fought there a long time ago, and countless people died on the battlefield, their blood and rage contaminating the soil, which caused creatures in the forest to become demons. like a boar that found a slain king's cape and became consumed by its ambition, and (even though cello didn't actually consult me when sneaking in the flies boss) the flies that consumed the corpses of soldiers learning bloodthirst. when slain, their blood again floods the forest, and their souls are laid to rest, or at least so the arms demon tells you. she actually lives in the blood of rage, bathes in and drinks of it, and lives to provide arms that keep battles going. but mortilla was born of that lingering hope that those arms would forever be lain to rest, the hearts that sank into the earth that yearned for a better future, and so secretly pursues slaying her. "mortilla," evoking a "small death," acknowledging the minimum amount of violence for peace. ripping off the arm that feeds if it causes you to bleed. that was the initial plan.
the game started out with a bunch of soulsborne players designing it, including myself, but none of us wanted it to just be a soulslike. so i emphasized verticality and aggression by a lot, but there are still similar elements that don't seem obvious. like for instance, you can sprint and not outrun the boar, of course, but to avoid its attacks you must jump a lot. the character is crouched and low to the ground to imply that springiness, and is very roughly frog-themed if you squint. so the equivalent to the grounded dodge roll is to sprint and then jump, which does give you a boost that is enough to avoid attacks if you travel laterally to the boar's charge, and unlike in souls, you can attack out of it as well while being close enough to follow up. when the boar charges you, you are supposed to charge a jump in anticipation, so the boar will slip under you and you can counterattack. i made it very jump-oriented, but i couldn't really communicate its design ethos haha. people seem to have wildly varying times with it contingent on whether they're spamming jump attacks and constantly moving very fast or not, so i tried to make the game more conducive to frantically running and sprinting at and around the boss so you're not wasting time getting back to it. if you're knocked away, there's a built-in slingshot if you immediately charge a jump slide to re-engage.
there was an initial design process where i wanted to communicate that some weapons are simply worse at engaging bosses than others, and initially i wanted it to be that the weapons distributed on the battlefield corresponded to the weapons that were worse against the boss. like "these were the weapons that fail to kill them." until the last ten minutes, the Burning Splinter (the long-ass sword) could not be used against the flies grounded either, and it was horrible to fight them with that weapon. but i relented and increased its vertical grounded hitbox and it trivialized the fight a lot, i feel like i should've kept it LOL.
i actually wanted the dragonbreath moves on the bone to be highly effective on the flies by making the flies disperse based on how many times they're hit rather than how much damage they take, which a constant flaming hitbox would be naturally better at doing. but the strong grounded tail attack can actually hit the fly, which also trivializes the fight 😩 and i believe the bone's strong tail attacks also heal you significantly on a hit. i was going to make tree-specific moves as well as dash-jump specific light and heavy attacks, but the mechanic was a little too specific to tweak with the time we had, so i made it so you can easily jump off them or attack while on the trees. the projectile weapons tended to be really powerful grounded and let you engage from a distance if you say, tree jumped really far away, so the long windup was intentional. what wasn't intentional though is that the projectiles heal you based on a hit, and you heal when you hit trees, so the gun and crossbow heal you massively just by shooting randomly into the forest. >:'3 all the bosses i had planned involved heavy use of trees, including the boar's ability to break them. can't say i could add a crouch button though, since mortilla crouches by default anyway 😞 a taunt move is a great idea though since i wanted the character to feel feral.