Welcome to this week's news post! This week we continue the exploration of Chimeros: Aurum Apostolum's various systems and how they function within the frame work of the project! This week its Evolution! Lets begin!

Evolution

The core of a Creature collector in our mind has always been evolution. While mono stage creatures offer their own stories of growth and strength, seeing your team grow stronger as you better familiarize yourself with the systems and learn better strategies. With this mindset, we went about workshopping our evolution system. Let's go over it now! Stages:

Broken down, each ETAs setup totals out to be 81 different creature evolution lines. 9 elements, by 9 types make for 81 creatures. Seems small right? Well each “Line” actually has 6 stages of evolution. That 81, suddenly goes to 486 total creatures. In production we refer to the stages by their number usually Stage: 1, 2, 3 ,4, 5, 6. Not very exciting. So we took a page out of Digimon’s book. We put names to each of the evolution stages. Instead of being 1, 2, 3, etc. they gained a sense of power and strength instead of a numeral value. 

Those new stages are as follows, the (number) is meant to show the relation from name to number.

• Baby (1), Fledgling (2), Imp (3), Ogre (4), Colossus (5), Titan (6)

See? Sounds a lot better now than “Stage-2”. Maybe if this was a mech game, We would have liked it more. Anyhow, let's keep exploring!

Evolution Items

Unlike Pokemon and other contemporary creature collector titles, we tried to make sure every system served more than one purpose. We have a cooking system, which required a system for dropping food, and we have a crafting system, which required a way to gather materials for medicine. Layering a third system on top of it should not have been too hard right? For once, it wasn’t. See, the hardest part was making a series of items for each Type of creature to have its own set of distinguishable and easily remembered items. Took a bit of work but once we had them nailed down it was easy work. Each collection of items numbers in 9, with each evolution requiring a different one of the items, each of the items being dropped by a creature of that evolution tier. It makes for an even spread of collected items. Even if you do not have that specific creature on your team, you are still collecting items for it! No matter what. 

Levels:

In normal RPG settings, the player/character/creature will go from level 1-100 with milestones every so often offering some sort of reward. An example of this is the Pokemon “Starter” who evolves at level 16 then again at level 32. Level 32.... That means your partner is done growing at level 32. Yes stats increase, and numbers go up but your partner has essentially finished its journey at level 32. There are still 68 more levels to go before the cap is reached. Considering that each level adds a new bigger EXP value to reach before the next level happens, and that wild pokemon often stale out around the 50~’s region, then well, what’s the point? Enter our solution to this incredibly personal, and pedantic gripe. 

Evolution stages are separated by semi-linear Level requirements to allow for a constant flow of progression. Coupled with the rogue-like evolution system (which I will get to in a moment) and you always feel like something is making your creature stronger beyond just a number going up.

Level requirements for Evolution are as follows

• Tier 1- the Baby stage has a level cap of 10
• Tier 2- the Fledgling stage has a level cap of 15
• Tier 3- the Imp stage has a level cap of 25
• Tier 4- the Ogre stage has a level cap of 50
• Tier 5- the Colossus stage has a level cap of 75
• Tier 6- the Titan Stage has a level cap of 100. 

Every 25 levels seems a bit excessive right? Well that’s not the end of it. Due to internal testing, we found that with some dedication you can reach level cap rather quickly. To combat this, we made a solution. Every time you level up, your level is reset back down to 1. Sounds awful right? Stats receive flat buffs every tier. A tier 4 creature will not be weaker than a tier 1 at level 1. Now, you’re always receiving feedback that what you are doing is progress in some caliber.

Regression:

Alright, last bit. Regression. All of the creatures on Chimeros Isle are creatures. Many of them pass from natural causes, releasing their natural energies back into the flow of that region's Ancient. That energy is recycled into the body of a newly born chimeros and the cycle loops. Why does this matter? 

Simply put, once a creature reaches level 100, you have the elective option to Regress back to the Baby stage, and change either their Element or Type, forming a brand new creature you may or may not have seen. 

This means your “partner” is always with you, unless you choose to evolve them. All evolutions are elective, not forced onto the player for any reason. This ties into our Evolution branches.

Evolution branches are how the creatures evolve outwards. Essentially it looks like this. (insert image here)

Each of the form options are a selection of criteria, either having the Same Element or Type from the creature's ETAs info. A Plant/Dragon can evolve into a Plant/Angel or a Lightning/Dragon because of how this is set up, but each evolution is randomized each time you regress, with the Original ETAs being a constant throughline within the creature's Evo-Tree.

Let's review!

The Evolution has several smaller parts that make up the totality of the system.

• Evolution items
• Level criteria
• Regression
• Evo-branches

With these parts working in tandem, they form the Evolution system! Took us a while for this system to be ironed out and we are rather happy with how far it's come. That's all we got to talk about this week! See you all next week for the next system we explore!