Cover art by Fliphrrr
Wait where did March/April go? Somehow or another it's time for another update! Let's see... what's happened since last time?
Playtesting
We're opening up playtesting for another wave of feedback this Friday, April 24th. I hope you get a chance to play! Let us know what you think.
Battle System Changes
The battle system is going thru a bit of an identity crisis. Pardon the bugs if you've played recently. Normally I keep these things tucked away in experiments branches but I've slowly just kept things on the default branch so I can keep everything in one build. I touched on some ideas in the last update, but here's what's new:
Reworked targeting system, less of a reliance on the cumbersome tab button to trigger thru targets
SP is a thing that's actually used in battles. It's a proper resource; skills will either generate it or consume it. Cooldowns are a lot more rare.
Dodging & Guarding, I was so hesitant to add these as it contradicted the ethos of the original battle system design. But after adding them... I kinda like it. These also play well with the passive system.
Enhancements to computer-controlled characters: archetypes like "tank" which will try to pull aggro off of squishier characters, "ranged", which keep distance, and so on to govern AI behavior. In general, AI will also back off when low health, avoiding crowding if possible.
As part of this, quite a bit of equips and augments need a second look. Still working thru these.
Localization & Tooling
Some behind-the-scenes work went into the localization tool, mostly to make translating the game as painless as possible. There are options to change text on-the-fly with the tool I shared before, and incorporate those in-game without reloading, downloading translation files, and so on.
I'm marching towards getting the demo localized. Speaking of which, if you're interested in helping translate the game reach out!
Steam Page in Japanese
The trailer, screenshots, and text have been translated to Japanese. Major thanks to えなじ～ for their tireless help in getting it localized.
Notable Bugfixes/Changes
Addressed lots of goofy widescreen tutorial issues.
Fixed a few issues with text on non-English Locales.
Improvements to the game's scripting system (autocomplete, label highlighting, and cmd click to jump to named labels.)
Upgraded to the latest version of gamemaker, the issues I encountered at the end of last year seem to have been resolved.
...And many others! Thank you so much for the reports.
Sprite Cleanup
Clydan's combat poses got a huge makeover. Characters have afterimage effects for certain skills.
What's next?
I'm doing some side-prep outside of the editor that I can't announce until early May. But I'm continuing tidying up bugs and incorporating all the awesome feedback we've received.
After April/May I hope we can move on past Act I and resume story content. Sometime!
Thanks,
Andrew
Story time for those reading to the end:
For some reason I thought it would be wise to fill placeholder messages for all the Japanese text in the game. I used the string 乇乂ㄒ尺卂 ㄒ卄丨匚匚 to test the bitmap font generation, accidentally left it in,
and felt incredibly embarrassed when I onboarded our translator last month.