Heyo, Youko here and it's time for the weekly update! ːashtonglareː
First things first, we'd like to give massive thanks to Allen Chan (CV for Ashton) and Meggie Elise (CV for Female Junius) for sending in their VA lines so quickly! We really appreciate the enthusiasm, professionalism, and effort they put into making the game better! ːaiheartː
Moving onto the actual update, this week we'll be trying something new. If you read the last update or have played the game in the last week, you'll notice that we've added the new mode selection screen. Currently, we're focusing on story mode as soon as possible, but we'd like some feedback on how we should implement it, especially with accessibility in mind! ːjeanthinkː
The main two concerns with the mode are:
- The battles are part of the story, so how should they be depicted?
- Should fail or non-perfect battle outcomes be accessible since they are a somewhat significant part of the story?
We've thrown around a few ideas and our promising ones so far are:
- Give the player and all allies an immortality toggle and boost the speed of how things play out, making the combat extremely easy and quick to get through, but still require some player input. It'll still impact outcomes that are time-based. There is a potential we can add a toggle to the immortality in the options that allows players to turn it off if they would like to experience the less perfect states.
- Some sort of automated cutscene/scripted battle that concludes very quickly. This option mostly limits the battle end stats to perfect or at least "very good", but will make it so no input is required whatsoever.
- Adding some sort of "surrender" option or choice selection that lets you pick between completion states. This would be the most straightforward and easy to control option, but most of the battle dialogue will be summed up/skipped, which isn't ideal.
We're very open to other suggestions and opinions, especially from the folks looking forward to story mode! Any feedback would be very helpful! ːjeanthinkː
Story mode aside, we've been making progress on Episode 3! Our background artist, Tobby, has been working hard on stages and backgrounds! He's finished up the Chapter 4 Main mission stage and will be working on further backgrounds next to better flesh out the world! ːallenshockː
More work is being done on the side missions as they're rather beefy. I'll be able to elaborate soon, but it's very hard to talk about them without spoilers... ːtiredadmiralː
On the bugfix side of things:
We've found a bug in S rank calculation preventing some people from getting the S-rank achievement. A fix will be applied next patch which should be coming very soon! If you were eligible for the achievement, loading the save and getting to the report card screen should automatically give you it.
If you happen to stumble across a bug, please report it to our discord server or in this steam post: https://steamcommunity.com/app/364210/discussions/1/3037102935217579854/ along with your zipped up saves. (Instructions in the steam forum post)
Thank you for supporting the game! ːaiheartː