Hey folks its been a little bit,

Sorry for the wait, I ran into an bug with the game engine and that prevented the usual monthly update November, but that's been resolved and December's work has been cleaned up so let's look at what has been completed:

Specializations Rework
Specializations didn't really feel very specialized to me, there's only so many stat changes that can be made and with 6 per part the problem became that each one was only changing a small factor of the character instead of pivoting the part to a completely different direction. Additionally, having the specialization appear as a random loot drop at level 3 removed the ability to use them in your first crawling segment, which isn't fun, and that also means it ate a loot slot. To fix this, Specializations have been removed from the level up loot pool, and are now available to select before a run in the "which one are you" UI - they have also been reduced in count from 6 to 3, and follow a new design philosophy:

1) The Traditional Role: this is by design how I see the character acting.

2) The Alternative Approach: this is how I conceptualize a sort of "same job, different way" role.

3) The Subclass: What would happen if we instead turned the character on their head, and changed a stat that they don't normally work around?

The goal here is to provide a playstyle modifier that can be planned around before the run, as now crawling sections that utilize the specialization can be encountered early without an issue, and you can go into a fight knowing a general direction you'll be going towards instead of figuring that out when you're offered the upgrade mid-run.

Ichor Rework
Ichor had more issues than I care to admit, but the worst violators were:

• Facilitating heal stalling and cheese
• Having zero meaningful interactivity during combat
• Not benefitting non-healers
• Invalidating non-healing moves
• Being really hard to understand the point of for a lot of players due to all of the above

To fix all this, I decided to change the entire mechanic from the top down:

• Ichor is now a resource pool for each part that is used by a part to heal itself and others; all healing moves now drain a portion of the part's ichor pool. This means healing is now a limited resource per fight, and also that healing moves can be a tradeoff of a very strong move while ichor is available, and a middling utility move when not.
• Ichor replenishes at the end of every combat - before replenishing, a percentage of remaining ichor is converted into a buff to maximum HP. This means for parts that never touch it, they get a little boost to their maximum HP every win - for the expected full run that means a total of ~75-150 extra maximum hp for some parts.
• Transfusion as a status effect has also changed to be able to replenish small amount of ichor (and in some cases maybe drain it as well)

These changes add a sort of tradeoff to several more powerful moves, gives a solution to heal stalling that isn't just nerfing or getting rid of healing, opens up new enemy ideas and Crawling choice designs, and overall feels much more fun and interactive compared to other approaches I've run through.

Leveling up
Leveling up now provides a small % of Max HP as a heal each level, this means additional levels can be used as healing tools, and that ichor increases will over time also lead to more passive healing.

Vasculurch Moveset Updates

Hypertensive Crisis:

• Increased damage scaling
• regains +3 ichor per level

Palpitate:

• Healing set to a flat 45
• Ichor Drain set to a flat 45
• Removed fatigue effect on self

Martyrdom:

• Healing set to 100
• Ichor Drain set to 100

Hypertrophy:

• HP Buff set to 100+50 per level
• Duration increased to 3 actions
• Added Buff of +3 Bone & +3 Sinew per level for 1 action
• Changed type from Heal to Effect
• Changed target type from Player to Both

The main move changes are just to make healing effects follow the logic for Ichor, Hypertensive Crisis is still the "facilitate a heal" move, palpitate is now balanced from Ichor, letting me remove the other balancing effects. Hypertrophy is a move that I want to be useful with % based damage or some weird behavioral manipulation.

Dopplegrabber Moveset Updates

Bile Bomb:

• Changed debuffs to be fluids biased by ~10%, complimenting other parts

Blood Oath

• Type changed to Healing
• Healing changed to 15
• Ichor Drain set to 30

Vampiric Veins

• changed to gain +1 Ichor per level

Dopplegrabber's changes were much simpler - Bile bomb is now more of a compliment to other damage types and rewards continued use which was my initial intent of the move; Blood Oath now mitigates a bit of the bleed effect, rewarding quick ends, and also makes more sense to use later instead of immediately due to the ichor cost. Vampiric veins can now pair with Ichor-using moves to use them more frequently. I think this might open up avenues for both loot and crawling choices.

Cyclopos Moveset Updates

Luxation:

• Added defense debuff of -4 sinew and -6 bone per level
• Removed damage scaling per level

Delerium:

• Changed type to Healing
• Healing set to 10 per level
• Ichor Drain set to 50
• Added 50% fluids buff
• Changed fatigue cost to 4, -1 per additional level

I wanted luxation to be more of an "opening an opportunity" move, rather than an alternative attack. taking the focus away from damage and more towards a burst debuff that lasts just a bit longer fulfills that fantasy. Delerium (might change the name to something like "Dormancy" later) is a sort of swing move I wanted to see more of - the fatigue cost dropping as levels increase allows Cyclopos to quickly heal, dodge a bit of damage and get a few good swings in, but it costs all the ichor of a fight so it's only super powerful once and then goes to a regular sort of buff.

UI Changes

• Added a New narrative status effect
• Stylized information popups
• Added Ichor, Fluids, and trauma display information on combat and main menu UI

A new status effect, Triage, has been added, which gives a slight description of the enemy's movements and actions in such a way that hopefully alludes to their fight's gimmick. This was done both to add more body to the enemies but also to provide more diegetic direction in combat to help those who might have had trouble figuring out what was going on.

Information popups are now designed to look more like the Guide in Darkness is giving you the information, and have been given a bit of juice to their animation. This coupled with the Triage effect hopefully gives the Guide a more active role, something that feels more like well, a guide.

Ichor, trauma, and fluids numbers have been given display points in the Combat and Main menu UIs; Ichor was an obvious requirement with how it was reworked, but Trauma and Fluids are values I initially didn't think to display since they didn't change much. However, showing that information to the player isn't a bad thing in my opinion, so it was added for clarity's sake.

Enemy Stat and Behavioral Changes

Helping Hand

• HP reduced from 175 to 150

Warning Sign

• Base Trauma and Fluids reduced from 60 to 40
• Brachial Bash: scaling has been increased to keep its damage "scary"
• The Hand That feeds: Updated to and Effect-focused move that applies a 100 HP buff and a 50 debuff to the respective characters instead of a direct attack and heal.

Manglerfish

• buffed HP from 250 to 300
• buffed Resistance to it's highest threshold
• Submerge: Removed Defensive stat boost
• Submerge: Added reduction of fatigue of a target by 2
• Submerge: Changed Behavior to target Tailbone or itself, in that priority order.
• Cast Away: Spawn effect reduced from 100% HP recovery to 50%
• Cast Away: Added a Regeneration effect of 20 HP over 5 turns

While testing I realized that I had balanced a few encounters around the fact you can heal, so I reduced the survivability of a few enemies and moved the danger that they pose to other factors in their fights. This hopefully keeps them dangerous without being boring or unfair.

Misc. Things
I added a few optimizations that allowed the file size to actually reduce this update.
I discovered a new creative drafting process that might make drawing up new sprites incredibly quick and easy.
I'm working on animating the second enemy that will appear for the first act boss, hopefully I'll be completely done with that and I can implement it sometime in January.

Thanks for sticking around folks, I hope you all had a good year and I hope to make you all proud in the next one.