Castle of Heart: Retold . Selected Animations
The original Castle of Heart. Realised in 2018 for Nintendo Switch was old school style platformer with unique twist. Done by small studio from Cracow had small amount of loyal fans but still had it's issues.
When 7Levels decided to make a remake the goal was clear : Improve gameplay and visualas. Give people what they wanted from the original.
With help of Kacper Widzisz and designer Mateusz Tobola we had to make decisions. What to remake what is most important in this game. So we focused on improving fights to make them more responsive and dynamic with keeping logic behind it as similar to original as possible and give enemies more character . So if you will say some of animations looks like old ones then you are right, with limited time we have made priorities focusing mostly on gameplay and iteration to find sweet spot. For me work was hard because I am not platformer player, I never played Castlevania for example but I knew how readability and telemetry is important in this type of games. But fortunetly we had great communication with rest of the team and fixes could be done in minutes.
When I was working on gameplay animations Kacper Widzisz did cutscenes and bosses.
With all this we can say that this game really has quality worth 2025. Now it's pretty small but enjoyable game which you can spend your weekend with.
It's available on Switch, Steam ando ther platforms.
All thanks to 7Levels for letting me working on this.
I hope you like it.
The KeyArt for Castle of Hearts: Retold
Made by Kacper Widzisz (shown by his permition)
Trailer for Castle of Hearts Retold. You can see few of animations in game.
The combo oryginally has cuts because you don't have to continue. Every step fo combo can be blend to idle but for most cases it's blend together making it fast and smooth.
Much more blended version similar to what we see in game.
Main combo with jump. We tried to get rid of walking combo from the original which were sluggish and found a jump. Jumping into enemies feel dynamic and heoric and add range to attack.
The jumping combo seen from further perspective. The forced perspective of side view requieres clean strong poses showing direction of attacks. Our sword is our main indicator.
Special Attack which requieres two weapons to make.
If our Knight loose too much health he losts his arm. But if you get enough of your health back you regain your arm to great happines of our character.
The old roll dodge looked more like throwing themselves out of the window. New one is more dodgy and in game is much faster to blend nice with running crouching or landing from the air.
Throwing granade. Fast, readible and can be match with many angles of granade flow.
The Villager Enemy walking. We tried to make him not exactly in control of his body but yet not totally zombie.
Alertness shown with shield.
Readiness for fight shown without shield.
Thier Attack is big slow visible easy to dodge.
It can loose it's balance easly.
But curse force it to fight further.
Goat Monster shows it's ready to attack player.
Since GoatMan character has similar anatomy to Swamp Monster we had to figure out how to add him something distiquish without changing his mechanic . The still follow recognazeble attack pattern. So we decided to make him jumpy.
Swamp Monsters are big and strong but not especially fast. Their walking attack give you time for reaction
Despide his size he can be thrown to the ground.
He is getting up slowly.