Hey there,

I'm proud to announce another huge step towards Early Access.

With the Companions Update, you no longer have to travel on your own.

See full changes below.

0.2 (Companions Update)

New Features:

• Companions

  • Add people to your party, pay their wages and they’ll help you however they can. For example: 

    • Increase carry capacity

    • Join battle 

    • Become the party's main trader, diplomat, etc. (see below for more information)

  • At this moment, 9 characters have been added to the pool, each fief holds three of them

  • Be careful! Dead companions cannot be revived!

  • Some of them have their own unique equipment, which can’t be unequipped or replaced

  • The maximum number of companions in a party is (1 + Eloquence / 2) rounded down

  • Some talents (Leadership, Herbalism, Motivation) are added to the party total talent value and therefore increase their effects depending on the total value

  • For other talents (Travelling, Logistics, Bartering, Persuasion, Diplomacy) only the highest level is taken into account for calculation purposes

  • This information is displayed in the Party Menu

• Level Up!

  • You were able to gain experience in battle before, now you can actually level up

  • Gain talent points depending on your Intelligence (and other bonuses)

  • Distribute them however you like (note that you can’t increase a Talent’s level beyond their max level, which depend on certain Attributes)

  • Every fifth level up, you gain an Attribute point

New Combat Features:

• “Motivation” now increases weapon damage and defense bonus (factor: (PartyMotivation / 1000) +1)

• Companions can now be added to your Combat Party and fight alongside you

• When there’s only one enemy/ally left, your attack/defend action will choose the last target automatically

• Added an “All Defend” button that sets everyone to defend themselves

• Added an “All Attack” button that sets everyone to attack a random enemy (will add a “smarter” option later)

• Critical hits will be highlighted (yellow for player party, red for enemies)

Attributes:

• Changed “Elegance” to “Eloquence”

Talents:

• Logistics has been implemented and increases both movement speed and carry capacity by ((Logistics / 300) + 1) and ((Logistics / 100) + 1) respectively

• Renamed “Skill Points (SP)” to “Talent Points (TP)”

QoL:

• Added hotkeys (shift, ctrl) to increase the number of items to add/subtract from the current one at the Marketplace (will add a “get max amount” function later)

• A message now displays when healing your party at the Medicus

UI:

• Changed the appearance of some UI elements (buttons, colors, etc.)

• Changed the font to a more readable one (will add the old one as an option later)

• When an event is resolved, there will be additional text to understand how it was resolved

• Added a banner to replace the black circle that displays your current position on the map (will be made customizable later)

• Added some more icons for weapons

• Woods are now slightly less opaque while moving through them

UX:

• Added the Main Theme of the game (plays almost all the time, apart from battle)

• Added a battle Theme, which will play during battles (who would have thought?)

• Added a Preferences menu where you can mute the soundtrack and/or set the volume

• Replaced the default cursor with a gauntlet (wow, so original)

• When creating a character, the “confirm” button will display, if anything has been left out (name, life choices and/or points)

• Added a Fiefs Menu, that displays additional information about Fiefs

• Can’t type “0” into the Marketplace input field

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a bug where having 0 gold would remove the “Gold” item and therefore not updating your current gold amount properly

• Prices are now properly (but not optimally) calculated

• The Weapons and Armor menu UI now properly updates after equipping/unequipping items

• Fixed a bug where Life Choice bonuses weren’t persistent

• When loading the game during the game (not at the start), your position wasn’t reset