Hello fellow ghouls, long time no speak! I'm sure you have been wondering what we have been working on, well today we are happy to lift the curtain of death and show off some of the changes to the afterlife that we have been making. Let's dig in!
New Residents
One of the core features of My Lil Afterlife is the residents system, where you can summon some spooky friends to hangout with. In the demo there are 7 residents you can summon, each with a different reason to do so. Since then we have added 3 more residents to the game:
Rex, a loyal hellhound who digs up crafting items
Susan Slime, a protective slime who sells a range of armour
Pudding, a zombie chef who sells a selection of food furniture
This means there are now 10 unique residents you can summon to your afterlife. Players will have to make a choice as to whom though as you can only summon 8 residents at a time. Worry not, you can choose to 'lay to rest' any chosen resident to make room for more. You will have to gather the reagents to summon them again though, but the choice is there should you want to fill your island with zombies or have a more eclectic mix of friends.
We have also worked on the residents AI and their dialogue options, adding idle animations to bring more life to your unliving friends, and adding a shortlist of greetings that each resident will cycle through when you interact with then.
As a stretch goal we'd like to add some more residents ahead of the games release, but we're committed to adding new residents frequently to the game as a part of the post release update cycle - we'll spill more beans on this though at a later date.
Friendships
What's the point in summoning these spirits though if you cannot befriend them. Well since the last demo update we have implemented a friendships system where you can increase your friendship level with each individual resident through finding their favourite gift. When increasing your friendship residents will reward you by offering more items or sale or changing their behaviour.
To view your friendship level with each resident, you can see it when interacting with them or via the friendships window accessed via the button at the side of the screen.
We plan on building upon this system further so would love your suggestions as to how we should go about this to make it more engaging and rewarding, so please let us know via the Steam discussion board.
New Items
Being able customise both yourself and your afterlife is another of the core features of My Lil Afterlife, so to stay true to this, we have added loads of new clothing items that you can wear and hold such as a wizards robe or a handheld spatula, as well as loads of new furniture items to decorate with such as hedge pieces and diner décor. These news items can be from dropped from the reapers minions, brought from residents or crafted by you.
Speaking of crafting we know the list of craft-able items at the crafting table was getting a tad unruly. To help, players can now sort items by their category making it a lot easier to browse the items and find the specific thing you are looking for.
We have also increased the decoration item cap, meaning you can now place a total of 500 items and hitting certain milestones will unlock new areas for you to decorate! At 15 furniture items placed, you unlock the cosy crypt, at 50 you unlock the west wing of the crypt, at 100 you unlock the east wing of the crypt, and at 150 you unlock the hidden beach at the north of the island.
We have more ideas for some additional unlocks once you place even more furniture items, but again that is something for us to discuss and add to the game as part of the post release update cycle.
New Fiends
It's not only new residents that have appeared in the afterlife, there are also new fiends to fight in the reapers tower too! We have added the second floor to reapers abode where you can find a grand ballroom, art gallery and armoury filled with the reapers minions. These minions are more aggressive than the ones you will find on the first floor so be wary and plan your attacks before charging head first into combat. The rewards will be great though, as these new enemies drop a range of new clothing, furniture and crafting items.
Once the game is released, we are also committed to adding additional levels to the reapers tower and once you reach the tenth floor, you will face the grim reaper himself in an epic showdown.
All this has been alongside the usable bug fixes to the core gameplay as well as frequent user testing. We're really excited to get the game into your hands properly and we should have something to announce on that very shortly, so stay tuned for that! In the meantime, thanks for all of the support and we'll see you in the next update.