KAESHI: a 2D beat 'em up with Sekiro-style parrying, free demo soon
Hi r/aigamedev! I've been working on KAESHI, a 2D side-scrolling action game where you parry enemy combos hit by hit, break their posture, and finish them. There's no guard button, and elite swordsmen and bosses can parry you back, so it plays more like a duel than a button masher.
All the art and animation were made with AI. The part that took the most work was animation. Every move started as a short AI video clip, which I turned into frame-by-frame sprites. The hard part wasn't getting good motion, it was keeping the character looking the same across dozens of clips and making attacks readable in the middle of a fight. I ended up rerolling a lot and retiming frames by hand so slow wind-ups feel heavy and fast slashes feel sharp.
The story, combat rules, level design and boss patterns are mine, and AI handled most of the production around them. It let me make something much bigger than I could have otherwise, but it still needed a lot of picking and fixing to feel like one consistent game.
The free demo (Chapter 1, two boss fights) is coming soon on Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/5349160/KAESHI/
Happy to talk about the workflow if anyone's curious!