Cover art by SaKo
Hello! Hope your summer has been good. Things have been hectic but I'm trying to make the most of it.
Broadly, the past month and a half has focused on a healthy blend of writing, Act 2 revisions, battle system adjustments, and bugfixing/cleanup. We ran another successful playtest with plenty of great feedback.
Revisions to Act 2
The bulk of work the past month went into some behind-the-scenes changes and additions to Act 2 content.
Added a new Clydan POV intro
Revised the mountains segment: split up the post-boss cutscenes a bit and added a new exploration segment to slow down the exposition dump
Included a new arkor “rescue” segment
Bumped out a dungeon to Act 3, for the purposes of pacing.
Into the wilderness. View mp4 here.
I realize this means little since most of you haven’t played Act 2 (it’s not public) but the takeaway here is that despite Act 2 going thru some revisions last year, I realized it was still missing something. The two key problems identified in internal playtests were related to pacing and focus. Pacing here involved allowing the player get on with the main objective of rescuing Illari sooner (maintaining the momentum established by the back half of act two). Focus here revolves around keeping the plot elements focused on the larger narrative. By cutting or postponing scenes, I feel this addresses most of the issues.
I’ve also drafted out more of Act 3-5, making sure I’m really happy with this before I start writing scenes. Realistically I should budget around 6 months max to get Act 3's scenes implemented to a mostly playable state, but we’ll see. As it stands, Act 2 (other than some enemy rebalancing) is there, story-wise.
Playtest Round 3
I sent out a wave of playtests. For everyone that provided feedback, thank you so much! There was some exceptionally good feedback this time around, relating to the game’s combat and usability that I’ve already addressed. I read and document every bug and suggestion sent my way.
If you haven’t yet, please send us your thoughts! Either through the title screen menu option, discord, email, steam forums, or whatever. These are more helpful than you realize, and it means a lot to us.
Speaking of feedback, there’s a new Devs Ask You forum on discord, where we’ll occasionally drop suggestion requests for specific game features. This week I’ve asked what your thoughts are on a Codex/Guide section for the main menu, to track game progress and objectives.
Battle system changes
These are ongoing, but I’m committed to getting battles as enjoyable and fair as possible.
Local avoidance: enemies will prefer to not group on top of each other, instead a gentle force will push them away when they’re not pathing
Attack “slots”: enemies will attack from one of eight segments around a player in-combat. Other enemies will wait around for a slot to free. Effectively, max 8 enemies should attack a single player.
Enemies will path to these slots instead of the character directly
Telegraphed attacks. Most enemy attacks will show a red area where the attack will land, giving you more of an opportunity to dodge or block
Esteri’s fight in particular benefits immensely from this. She has a new attack as well.
In general, enemy cooldowns are now 20% shorter to compensate
Computer-controlled characters will no longer attack enemies with counter. (For real, finally!)
Computer-controlled characters can force a dodge on certain tile effects (this is used in the Esteri battle as well)
Added a HUD fade effect, when battlers are obstructed by the character UI on the top-left
Added a brief slowdown effect after battle for style. (Emphasis on brief, but let me know if this feels obnoxious.)
Using SP potions in combat will auto-target the player with the least SP (not HP, oops)
Some battle changes. View mp4 here.
Game changes
Players can dodge and break stuff with their weapons (or fists, if you’re a particularly burly professor) inside and outside of combat.
Sometimes you’ll find goodies.
Characters hidden behind the environments will now have “shadow” sprites drawn where they are occluded.
Characters have diagonal run animations (thank you, Fran!)
An indicator will display when the game is autosaving
Loot toast will consolidate, so if you quickly loot multiple of the same item, they get combined to a single “ x acquired” toast
The button to skip skippable cutscenes is now displayed in the UI (it’s LT, or the dodge key)
Add support for a larger character set, in preparation for Portuguese and Spanish localizations
It's just one of those days
Other Notable fixes
We addressed several bug reports (again, thank you so much!). Some notable ones include:
Corrected Stab’s “Reinforce” augment, so it no longer simply auto-heals without hitting a target
Changed the Initial skills (stab, bash, etc) so they’ll try to map to the same key as confirm on controllers.
Addressed an incredibly obnoxious bug where the village theme would briefly play before Illari knocks on your door (louder than normal, maybe?)
Added an establishing scene after the infiltration so the player isn’t wandering around looking for the mines.
Many others: the odd crashes, making it clearer which carts can be pushed, mine cart freezes, velocity not clearing on pause, elevation trigger issues
Upcoming
Steam has a Party-based RPG Fest in September. We’re working towards formally releasing a demo then, so if you have any suggestions for the game please let us know!
The demo is planned to be the same content, but with more languages, more usability improvements, and anything else we can tuck in before then.