Milestone 3,5
February 1, 2026
Welcome to the first Devblog of The Sealed King!
We wanna show you the highlights, what we have done last week and give some insides from our production.
Statement
If you don’t know our game already, don’t hasitate - we have a little statement following now.
Fight as a powerful heavy villain in intense, satisfying combat. Pay with health to cast special attacks. Overthrow the unworthy king.
Level Design
With every milestone we try to complete a new area in level design. This time, however, we’re excited to show a bit more already. Here you have some peeks at two of our newest areas, The Grand Courtyard and The Throne Room.
Bug of the Week
Related to the level design work, we introduced a new level streaming system to provide a better overall experience and improved performance. In the first iteration, testing turned out to be really fun.
In some cases, entire areas would suddenly unload, sometimes including the one you were currently standing in. Watching the area disappear around you created a funny moment we wanted to share.
Enemies
We want to include 3 enemy types at the end of the game, our finished ones before the last milestone where the swordsman and the archer.
Only the swordsman model is finished. Since we focus on the main character model, this can also take a while until we provide different similar models for the archer and spearman. Wait… Did I say spearman? Our newest, now finished, implemented enemy is the spearman, utilized as a tanky enemy with a spear and shield, trying to defend his castle with his last strength.
He was kind of a pain to implement but fits our needs exactly to make the game more tactical and not slasher-like, just letting the player feel challenged a bit more.
Special Attack
We implemented our first special attack, including an area of effect circle that surrounds our main character. All enemies in this circle gain constant damage over time.
Our design goal was to play with the risk of using this special attack by lowering your health by a significant amount upon activation. This should make the player sacrifice his health for power.
Like with all VFX in our game, we used the Niagara system from Unreal to create a VFX that indicates the range of the special attack and shows the strength, as the life from the enemies gets soaked out and returns to the player. This happens with a life-draining beam. The VFX should have a slightly in/out fade to not interrupt the gameplay.
Our main character’s identity is being a heavy villain with immersive power, so we also used purple as the main color for our character. To distinguish between the main character’s identity and the special identity, we choose to use a red, bloody color, which supports the ability of being special and shows the actual health you sacrificed - including the blood you drain from the enemies.
Parry & Finisher
In our game, you can parry attacks by blocking with the right movement before you take damage. This parry should have an impact on the enemy.
Because you are the powerful villain, you normally don’t want to play defensively, as this would indicate you’re not powerful enough to fight a little hero. We want this parry to result in a stun. The stun is the end for the enemy when hitting the right timing to parry, the enemy’s story has already been written.
You can finish stunned enemies, letting them die brutally. How dare they attack you? They will pay with their life.
Currently, we have a stunning animation for the enemy, which indicates that you can just execute the enemy. In the next milestone, we plan to implement our new player model, which has been in production for about one week. This will include a nice finisher animation that does it justice. Currently, our blockout player has blockout animations, which do not include a finisher animation.