It's been 8 months since Slingshot Quest's Demo released. Since then, I've been hard at work hammering away new content, and I think it's about time I revealed more of it.
Campaign
Slingshot Quest is internally divided up into "Acts". You can think of them as "Episodes", "Chapters", "Arcs" and so on:
Act 1 spans the beginning of the game up to the moment after the first dungeon, where the title card drops.
Act 2 spans from the (Spoilers!) burial scene to the end of the demo.
Act 3 is the first post-demo Act, and what I've spent the majority of my time on. I'd say it's ~80% complete at this point.
I'll break it down further:
Dungeon: ~100% finished (Unique shop, unique overworld/battle/victory tracks, fully-furnished rooms, "Inspect" flavor text, lootable treasure chests)
Story: ~85% finished (All cutscenes implemented, but some lacking SFX and a few animations)
Enemies: ~60% finished (All implemented, with unique 3D models and new fighting styles, but lacking any custom animations)
Final Boss: ~100% finished (Battle fully implemented, with multiple phases)
Quality Assurance: ~40% finished (Lots of bugs left...)
I've also started work on writing the dialogue and greyboxing the level design for future Acts. The path the heroes will go on has been charted, from start to finish.
Battle Revamp
I've reworked quite a few battle mechanics. Let's go over most of them here.
Turn Icons
The "Turn Queue" is now visible to the player, and shown on the top left of the screen during battles with little custom icons for every enemy type.
It's something I've been wanting to do from the beginning, and this change should hopefully make battles feel more intuitive to new players.
Critical Attacks
The small QTE minigame you perform when attacking has been reworked to have consistent timings, and if you perform well enough on it, you unlock an additional "critical" attack to deal extra damage, which feels pretty satisfying to pull off.
AOE Distance
The base power of a spell's AoE now subtly scales with the distance to the caster. This makes it slightly more beneficial to cast offensive spells on nearby enemies compared to distant ones, and it works in tandemn with the next feature I've added.
Formations
You can now move around the battlefield, into unoccupied slots, so you can deal that extra little bit of damage to enemies.
It works similarly to a sliding-tile puzzle: you have to think ahead and free up slots you may want other heroes to occupy later, in order to maximize the effectiveness of your spells.
This system is entirely optional, but it adds some extra skill expression to the game.
Stat spell rework
In the demo, the AoE intensity of a stat spell only influenced how many turns the effect lasted.
I've reworked the system to handle percentage-based stat increases, which are then scaled by the AoE intensity.
Instead of lasting a fixed number of turns, every stat modifier loses 10% of its power during a turn. In addition, these stat modifiers can stack (up to -100% or +100%), so if you keep spamming the same stat modifying spell on the same characters, you can really change their power level over a few turns.
LVL-Up Awards
Leveling up can now unlock new spells or affinity changes, in addition to the stat upgrades the Demo had.
I've also removed some of the heroes' base spells and moved them to these LVL-Up bonuses, which should make new players feel less overwhelmed when starting out.
Other stuff
UI Animations
The UI has much more dynamic animations now.
Some people may prefer playing without these, however, so it's something that can be toggled on and off in the Settings.
Portrait Revamps
While I still have a lot to learn, I've been improving my 2D art skills over the course of SQ's development, so I went back to some of the Demo's portraits and tried to improve them a bit. Now, they're more accurate to my vision for the characters, and they also have a bunch of new facial expressions.
I'll most likely do this for a bunch of other assets, so expect further improvements down the line.
Minimap Exploration
The Minimap/Pause Menu Map screen no longer show unexplored parts of the world.
I think this'll greatly help with encouraging exploration and scouting out every part of the level for secrets or treasure.
New Spell Naming System
I've replaced the placeholder Google-Translated Latin words from the Demo with a proper unique naming system for the spells. Spell names are all made up of "tokens".
Offensive spells begin with the "ki" prefix token, Miracle elemental types have the "mira" token, and fully powered-up spell types have the "nagi" suffix token. Therefore, Charlie's spell in the screenshot is called "kimiranagi".
I won't go over all the tokens now, since I think it'd be more fun for players to have to figure this stuff out on their own.
Release Planning
That's everything important I've added. So, when will all of this be available to play? Honestly, I don't really know.
My original plan was to release the full game at once, after the demo. But I'm a solo developer making almost everything myself, and looking at how much work I have ahead of me, it could take many years for the full game to be ready. One Act seems to take around ~8 months to be fully finished, and I want the game to have ~10 Acts in total.
I don't want to make people have to wait that long for new content.
I could do "Early Access" and/or have each Act released separately (Similarly to how DELTARUNE does separate releases for each Chapter), but at some point, after adding enough content/acts, I'd have to charge money for the game, which isn't something I would feel comfortable doing for a version of the game that isn't 100% finished.
Therefore, for now, I'll continue to develop the game privately, and release development newsletters like this every once in a while, for anyone interested in reading them.
Conclusion
Thank you very much for taking time out of your day to read all of this. Hopefully I'll see you again soon!