12/6 Status Update

Here we are in December, the final stretch of 2024. It's a little early for a yearly retrospective, but I'm sure I'll do one. A lot of stuff happened this year after all. For now though let's talk about the past week.

The demo came out, I got some feedback, and it seems like I'm pretty much okay to go ahead. There's some stuff that needs changing, but no major overhauls of entire systems of anything. So I did some writing, and made lots, and lots of items.

The big innovation this week was in skill modifiers you can equip. I knew there would have to be ways of increasing the power of skills overtime, but I thought that was probably going to be something like Sleep+ where the skill itself is upgraded. Instead I've decided to go in a direction more focused around customization.

 

Here you can see Vashti (with the wrong portrait because characters always have their default appearance when I test levels independently) has a weapon, three skills and then two other things with no art. Those are equipment that modify her Viper Strike skill. In this case one increases the damage over time, and the other increases the stat debuff. You can run both of these, only one, or none. So in this case the player is specializing in making Viper Strike as good as possible, but using half their inventory slots to do it. They could instead do something like this:

 

Here four skill slots are all being used to buff Empower. So this is more of a Vashti focused on using her normal attack compared to the poison Vashti who was doing more debuffs. You could also not use any modifiers at all and put in lots of different skills going for more of a generalist build. The idea is to give options and let the player decide how they want these units to function.

In addition to skills, there's also all sorts of equipment you can use. One of my favorites so far is called Extendable Arms, which lets characters grope and be groped from two tiles away instead of only one. It changes how you have to think about positioning a lot. I also added a bow for Zaman that will let gropes still happen with him even if he's in his girl form and I'll have to do one for Shah as well, because currently those kind of break the routing system.

 The art preview for today is the counterpoint to the fem Zaman + Shah art from last week. This time it's fem Zaman + Vashti. These two scenes both happen at the end of act 1, the difference being what route you're on. Unless you're in the null route, every outcome in Netoria 2 has the same amount of scenes and content. It's not like Netoria 1 where some routes had fewer scenes than others, it's all the same in this one.

Last up for this week is some line art for a few character portraits. I didn't like how some story important characters had default SRPG Studio portraits but didn't want to commission full pieces of art for them. So this is the compromise. here we have the Sultan, who shows up mostly at the beginning of the game, Azar's Mother, who appears in his flashbacks, and Nazira, a friend of Vashti's who shows up in her flashbacks and in her first POV level.

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