Hello everyone!
First month of the year down, and Those Who Rule has made some large strides. I started the month mainly heads down on bug fixes, and wrapping up QoL around promotions, forging, and refinements, as well as adding the final "juice" to give life to the new UIs. That was all completed, and the new demo version was pushed out earlier today with the bug fixes and QoL updates that I've been working on the past couple months.
We also finished the Hunter and Blade classes. Here is the Blade class ability "Frontal Assault" that allows you to attack three times if attacking a unit from the front, regardless of agility. Combine it with their other ability "Swift Strikes" that allows them to execute all their attacks before an enemy can counter, as well as a greatsword and you get a pretty powerful combo!
Moving on, I've also started work on Chapter 4. Before moving forward with too much of the story I decided to go back and finish writing how the story will progress through the game, all the major plot points, and how the story will ultimately end. We now have the story completely finished, pending the little narrative decisions that get made in each chapter. With that in mind I've completed all the writing and dialogue for chapter 4, and now have the map/gameplay left to implement.
Changelist
- Completely revamped skill icons.
- Added indicators for the direction a unit is facing.
- Two new classes added, along with their abilities: Hunter and Blade
- Chapter 2 has received it's own battle music (now different from chapter 1).
- Completing/failing an optional objective now has a success/failure popup.
- Turn count and controls now shown on screen.
- Re-wrote the prologue dialogue to align with the rest of the story now that it is planned out.
- The training battles (Chapters 1 and 2) are no longer lost when one unit dies.
- Training battles no longer have blood effects (prologue/later chapters still have it).
- Introduced V-sync to hopefully address the CPU high load issues reported in the forums.
- Added tutorials for navigating the base, forging, and unit death.
- Updated all Steam store capsules.
- Added a little extra mid-chapter dialogue to existing chapters for added character building.
- Blood turned off for training chapters.
- Refinements added to chapter 3 shop.
- Fixed an issue where the frame rate was limited to 2 FPS.
- Fixed an issue where punch was not working correctly against targets with "First Strike".
- Small performance improvements.
I still have a goal of two chapters completed per month to meet the release goal of Q4 2024, so I'm tracking how long each element takes me so I can better estimate. All the dialogue for the new chapter took me roughly 4 days. The map has taken 3 so far, and I'm anticipating 1 or 2 more. If I'm aiming for a chapter every two weeks, that leaves about a week left for adding new characters, balancing the map, side quests, base conversations, and new map mechanics.
I think this is doable, but this month will be the ultimate test. If I can complete chapters 4 and 5 this month, then we are on track for our release date. If I start noticing it takes more time, I may have to adjust, so stay tuned for the next update! With all that said, I've been extremely motivated through Jan. I think we can do this.
Thank you all for your support.
Cheers,
Eldin T.