IT’S OCTOBER 

are you ok

disney built the biggest and most expensive animatronic ever in their history and then built a mountain around it and it BROKE a couple of months after the ride opened and it’s impossible to fix it without dismantling the entire mountain structure and that’s honestly the most hilarious verified disney fact™ ever

the second most hilarious being that the chum animatronic on the finding nemo ride at epcot used to pop out of the barrel to scare guests but one time a cast member was walking past it during an opening/closing procedure and it popped out and smacked them clean in the face so now it’s turned off permanently

blasphemous tidbits

the architecture in blasphemous was based on the architecture of seville

cvstodia is spelt so even outside of the in-game font

francisco goya’s art allegedly also gave the makers inspiration

the idea for blasphemous started when the creative director and CEO & producer of blasphemous talked about “how a game using cultural references from the Spanish folklore solely would look like in the eyes of an international audience”

the “fourth boss was particularly challenging to design [artistically or programming-wise], and there is a lot going there lore-wise.” (i don’t know which they mean by fourth boss)

many and much of blasphemous’ characters and lore were inspired by 16th c. and 17th. c. legends of seville

the creative director and level designer are big fans of berserk

the makers of blasphemous plan to add free DLCs and further content in the future, incl. kickstarter stretch goals and expanding the story

the makers may consider adding a spanish dub of the game in a later patch (english voiceover was a specified kickstarter stretch goal and they had no money left for funding a spanish dub)

the penitent one wears a senbenito. penitents during the spanish inquisition wore these conical hats as punishment while processioning through the streets

seville, the makers’ home city, was the headquarters for the spanish inquisition (explains a lot)

animations were not made by rotoscoping. blasphemous had multiple animators, each with their own style and method. one animator actually recorded himself practising sword martial arts as a guide (although it was not used for rotoscoping)

ideas such as teleporting to enemies, double jump, and multiple dashes were discarded as they wanted the penitent one to feel “weighty”

they experimented with a holdable block but removed it because they felt it encouraged passivity and removed tension from combat

the parry is an “exploration” tool, encouraging players to learn about different enemies’ attacks and timing, and decide how best to defeat an enemy

“exploration + risk/reward was a big part of our [gameplay mechanic] decisions“

castlevania symphony of the night was a huge inspiration, and doom was a (lesser) inspiration for the combat part of the game

the level designer likes cinemassacre, mark brown and jim sterling, and loves no man’s sky. apparently the team watches every single video of mark brown’s lol

coding crisanta was “specially hard” as she has many different states and animations

“Every part of the lore and dialogues were made individually and not as a whole.“

the makers of blasphemous have 200+ animations of the penitent one

the level designer loved bloodstained and said they would be up for a crossover thing with the developers of bloodstained if the opportunity came up

the most blasphemous thing that has happened is one of their producers made a t-shirt of some cool concept art of blasphemous, “disgracing” it. the t-shirt is apparently really ugly

they found it difficult to convey the penitent one’s feelings because of the helmet, so they tried to convey it through animations. they said feeling was important and that the penitent one is feeling a lot throughout the game

the music composer was inspired by dark ambient music and ancient flamenco, and experimented with several middle-age instruments and electronic synth

blasphemous’ combat is not actually based on dark souls at all, “at least not consciously”

every time you have fallen onto spikes and died, it has been a necessary cost to make death and the penitent one feel physical and real in-game (rather than, say, appearing at the edge of the spike pit with less health). or so i interpret this

the shape of the Tears of Atonement and that the Penitent One sketches with blood, etc. is based on the pose of the Twisted One

they are going to add map zoom

level design was done by testing again and again and again by trial-and-error and using iteration

it was difficult for them to get the feel of hitting an enemy to be satisfying but it was also important to them to get it right

info gathered from news updates on the blasphemous steam feed and from a blasphemous AMA on reddit

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Sunset photographed between the Temple of the Sun and the Temple of the Moon

Cathedral Valley, Utah, taken March 2017

The Last Of Us Part II memes with their original counterparts :)

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the "it's just the wind/creaky floorboards/wild animals" horror cliche hits different when you don't live in the city