I'm very bad at posting steam updates but I come bearing lots of news. Over the last 6 weeks, myself and some discorders have been playtesting the heck out a small section of Critterrupters. This little playtest was focused on just the park area letting you have a taster of battles, downloading and swapping cards. Whilst it's only just a little section in regards to exploration, it's all very foundational and will benefit the game at large!
There's now Idle animations too, bringing lots of life to battles.
Critterbytes
There's 3 new types; Air, Malice and Martial and all the Critterbytes have been assigned their elements, meaning some will be different from Isle of Swaps, and there's 18 total to download in this playtest. Each one has a list of download conditions to meet that increase their download chances above 0% and you'll need some specific teams to capture certain Critterbytes. Turns out, players would attempt a download to avoid being interrupted, but now you only get 3 chances to download a Critterbyte before it gets corrupted and vanishes. This has certainly made downloading more a deliberate action.
Battles
This is the main bulk of work that's happened. When you interrupt a Critterbyte, a debuff is inflicted based on the interrupter's element. When you hit a weakness, a debuff is inflicted based on the Skill's element. This makes being interrupted and hit by a super effective attack more punishing than just more damage.
I've got some new status effects like Seed (when the seeded target is attacked, the attacker heals by however many Seed stacks were on the target), Speed Up/Down and Focused (blocks being interrupted) and implemented an Outnumbered buff. When one side has less Critterbytes than the other, they'll increase their stats until the teams are even again to prevent snowballing. Maybe you want to do 1v3 battles to abuse this?
And in the Quality of Life angle; the Inspection Mode shows the ability, elements, weakness, resistances and any status effects on each target, a full glossary of all the status effects, a list of weakness and interrupt effects and the element match up chart. Tooltips to explain effects applied by a Skill are shown, by popular request there's a combat log and in general the whole thing runs very smoothly. You even heal a bit after battles to keep you adventuring!
Skateboarding
I should've just made a skateboard game as players have found plenty of fun rolling around. There's a bit of momentum, you can press a button to do a kickflip at will, and there's some skate ramps which could potentially lead to hidden areas in the future
The CriTer menu
Opening up your CriTer (Critterbyte Terminal) is the main way to interact with your Critterbyte team. On the summary screen you can equip mods to your Critterbytes to change their skills, stats and add abilities. The storage will keep your Critterbytes easily accessible to move to and from your team, with additional functionality to remove Mods right here. And the Mail was most recently added to give the player tips and direction through little notes that didn't really need a character explaining them all. And at this point, there's a decent amount of tutorilisation. Mostly temporary for this playtest but it's good to learn what players need to be taught.
I don't really know how to end this update, but please wishlist Critterrupters if you haven't, and if you have, tell a friend!