Midweek Devlog #4 Getting the Bats Ready

This week has been spent working on the revisions prompted by the streams of last week, and I'm making some decent headway. The final boss of the demo has gotten some pretty major overhauls and is almost completely reworked. I'm presently in the process of brainstorming the changes to the first half of the demo, the part of the game that got the most flak in regards to writing. 

Balancing Desk (Unimplemented) 

I've also made numerous tweaks to combat, and I'll talk about those changes.

Scald - No longer free. Requires 10 TP to perform. Fire Break status has a 75% chance to inflict now instead of the much lower percent it was at. 

Eruption - MP consumption increased to 90 MP and 30 TP. You will not be able to freely spam this move. This was the biggest offender in terms of balance I saw in the streams and something I do not want to see done often.

I will be adding more helpful descriptions to the skills in the final battle party member as I think people missed some very helpful info about what they should be doing in the fight. I definitely saw people were not playing this fight wisely and cost themselves some pain they didn't need. I may write a tutorial on the boss fight because there was just that much people missed. 

Assets, Screenshots, and Level Design

Wina is starting to walk!

I'm likely to at least finish this walk cycle today and then move on to main project dev for the rest of the week, but she's actually moving. The big deal that prevented me from moving onto this step was designing Phoenix God form's frames. The trouble with that was each design was based off the previous, so I needed to finish all three layers before I could start walk cycles. We're just now getting into that, so expect a lot more progress on this end soon.

Unfortunately that's all I have asset wise. We'll see more as the weeks go by and I have more free time to focus on assets. Game design is more important than assets so assets will be a bit behind while we get the demo properly up to snuff. And, we're going to be seeing major changes to the demo in the next few weeks, so that's why assets have to fall behind a bit.

Let's address the topic of major changes!

Version 0.2.0

Version 0. 2. 0 is going to be a thing, and here's what's coming.

• First half rewrite and revamp
  • Opening will show Wina's line of work and her human class' capabilities. This won't be a unique class to Wina as Vola will also have the Spy Class. This will replace her opening remarks about her work day, and you will actually experience it rather than her telling you about it. 
  • Wina & Jarel Date remains the same - for now. For the final sequence, a mix of story illustrations and gameplay for lite fun, potentially some mini games. Look forward to this. There will be some cleaning up of Jarel and Wina's conversation leading up to this however as it can be simplified and made to the point.
  • Laura mini fight - You get the direct satisfaction of a high level Spy class beating the tar out of a certain annoying Security Agent as a teaser for what full game human class progression would feel like.
  • Giao vs Security Agent fight - This will be an actual combat sequence showcasing the Gunslinger class. This will be the final human class combat portion for the rest of the storyline. 
  • General Streamlining in bigger story scenes.
• Rebalancing of the most obnoxious encounters (Nixie, Boiling Crawler, Primal Beast, I'm looking at you).
• New areas in the Earthen Realm (for exploration purposes and to redistribute some of the lore bits further as to not overload on lore dumps. Basically, for those who want more gameplay in between lore).
• Tweak to the Fire Realm mini dungeon (I hear you, the healing statues will be fixed.)
• Final Boss Rebalancing (Includes clarification of some of the skills the party member that helps you out in last phase does because there was a lot of confusion here).

I'm on the fence about officially implementing the wip of Wina's elemental form in this update, it is less visible than defaults on default backgrounds so I may wait a while and implement some custom battlebacks first. I don't believe I'll have time for that in this update though so don't count on it.

It's going to be a while still until we get any artwork of characters, as the artist I contact has been having a lot of issues and won't be able to start for a while. We've more important issues to worry about than pretty graphics, so it's not a major issue for me. I am still looking forward to seeing the end results of their work however.

That pretty much covers everything you need to know about things, it will take a while but I hope to have the first major update to the demo out within a few weeks. It *may* be longer than that though, as things in my life rarely go my way. I'm rather infamous for underestimating things.

You all have a good week, and try not to get eaten by the Boiling Crawlers until I can nerf bat them all.