1/10 Status Update

Last week was the demo party over on my discord, thanks to all those who participated. It was a lot of fun and gave me plenty of feedback. This week I've been implementing plenty of changes in response to that feedback. Luckily most of it was adjustments and tweaks and not "you need to overhaul this entire system". So that's good. But it's also a little bit of a problem because overhauling entire systems is easier and more fun than tweaks and polish.

But I did get to do a few fun overhauls, like cutting a level, adding item slots that unlock over time, and creating a dummy party member for characters that can transform in battle to let you create load outs for their TF'd form separately. That last one took quite a bit of puzzling to figure out how to make work, and has created lots of bugs to track down. Basically, if you're playing as Zaman, for example, in the manage units page there will be a girl Zaman with a different inventory. When you transform in battle, boy Zaman will be replaced with girl Zaman and their inventory will change as well. So now you can specialize them and not have dead weight items that don't do anything on one side of the other.

The level I cut was the last one in the demo, the battle on the ship. It was pretty bland and didn't really add much. So I just got rid of it and I think the pacing still works. That leaves Act 1 with ten levels now. That means you'll get to the juicy act 2 stuff earlier, although the buildup has had to have been compressed a bit. One of the POV exclusive set up scenes now happens in the same level as the last Zaman/Shah/Azar/Vashti relationship drama scene. I put it after the base scene to try and break them up a bit, but it's still not totally ideal.

I also got some new art in, and it's different art than usual. Like a world map:

I had this made because I felt there was a lot of describing the terrain the characters traveled through, but it really would be better if I could show their progress visually. Show that they are at these specific mountains, and past them is this specific sea. Plus since it's a story about traveling, having some idea of the distances involved is important. The plan is that before every level you'll see what distance the party has covered since the last one and where they're heading.

The other piece of art is scene art, but it's not sexy. What horrible mismanagement of the budget is this?! I felt there were moments in the story that would really benefit from some illustrations, but Rad Lad is already really busy. So I hired another artist I've worked with before to do a bit of style matching. I think it turned out fairly well.

 It's not a perfect match, but it should be close enough that you're not distracted by a sudden shift in art style or anything. This is for when Danya firsts joins the party in the Lovers Passage level. Not she has a big piece of splash art, that should be a much more impactful intro than what's currently there.

Some other changes have been the addition of an easy difficulty mode and some adjustments to difficulty overall. As well as lots and lots of bug and typo fixes. At this point I feel comfortable moving ahead int he timeline of the game. There's two levels left and a lot of writing before act 1 is fully complete. the current target of early March in about two months seems pretty achievable.

That's all for this week. As always, thank you for your continued support.