EP:Backrooms v6.5.0 - HUGE Update

Hey! It's Sifa 😄

It was a tough month, because we basically created a new game again 😅 So let me try to explain what we've done with this update

Card Fight (aka Battle Phase)

At first I just wanted to improve Battle Phase gameplay. I spent days and nights on designing new effect systems and different layouts for action cards. At the end I removed 80% of the battle system... It's hard to explain everything that I changed. Though, the main change is SIFA stats and Karma points being removed completely. Goodbye SIFA, hope we ever meet again.

God knows it wasn't simple. Because basically all the cards became useless, and all the events too. Despair, sadness, yep, but the new battle system was so promising that we decided too give it a try. We made a very simple Enemy cycle system, and started to work on the Card Fight part of the game. And I think it's cool now 🤩 So, I'll try to give the main Card Fight changes, we also added the tutorial into the game, so it explains everything quite good.

Card Fight Changelog:

• SIFA removed
  • Stress and Arousal are used to play Action cards
• Karma points removed
  • TF stat is used to play most of the Enemy cards. Basically, player being transformed during the card fights (quite slowly, though)
• Turn based Gameplay: use your Action cards, when you want to End Turn use one of Enemy cards
• 4 Card types, when card is used +1 Effect stack is added
  • Drain effect - deal damage each turn
  • Flow card - cards in hand get bonus power each turn
  • Refresh - draw cards each turn
  • Burst - next card gets bonus to power
• New effects that use the type effects and effect counters
• all the Action cards have Male and Female variations (including Artworks), which give Masculine or Feminine Experience when being used.
• Most of the cards have basic and upgraded version. Though, upgraded version isn't always a better choice, because it takes more Stress/Arousal to play.
• added 60 Action cards in total (including male, female, upgraded and basic variations).
• added 10 enemy cards
• added a useful tutorial that can be opened any time during the battle phase

We gonna add new cards quite often. We already have enough artworks to add as much content as in this update. And coding them isn't that hard anymore. 😌

Events and NPCs

So, as I said, all the events became useless. 😑However, when we finished Battle Phase, we had a simple enemy cycling system with random card drops, for testing purposes mostly. And we got used to it. It were closer to what I had in mind, something closer to Slay the Spire rogue like mechanics. So I started to think in this direction. Instead of trying to get something from the old events, we just started from scratch. However, because of that decision we got back NPC progression. I really liked the similar system in christmas update. But this time it's not just about undressing. Now, on certain progression stages you get special events (sometimes very special 🥰), which later can be used in Battle Phase with this specific character. I really really like this idea. Anyway, let me try to form a full changelog for events and npc. But remember, this part isn't complete yet.

Events and NPCs changelog:

• added female NPC - Bubblegum - Player_Male_Top x Female_Bottom progression
  • you can ask her to give you new clothes
  • 6 progression stages, 3 unique enemy cards
  • a bit of a story
• added femboy NPC - Blue Belle - Player_Male_Top x Femboy_Bottom progression
  • you can train with him to upgrade or remove cards from your deck
  • 6 progression stages, 3 unique enemy cards
  • mini-comic with this character
  • each stage has a short story
• added male NPC - Stylist - Player_Femboy_Bottom x Male_Top progression
  • you can ask him to apply new cosmetics on you
  • 4 progression stages, 2 unique enemy cards
  • a bit of a story
• reset mechanics after the loop (1 loop = 20 events)
  • card deck being reset, you can choose between several "starting" decks
  • NPC progression being decreased by 1 (so you can get through some progressions once again. It's more fore the future, because we gonna add more "loops" with different ideas, themes, NPCs and such)

So, my idea is that each NPC should be unique, with unique personality, their story should develop, each should get their own progression. Not just progression, but different progressions. So soon I gonna make different ways to progress related to Player's look (body TF, clothes, cosmetics, etc.) And more content related to characters we already have. And ANIMATIONS.

Next update will be about Clothing/cosmetics effects. So they will be way more important. And I also will add more clothes/cosmetics. And maybe some unique clothes can be given to characters or taken from them. We will see.

So, I think I covered the most. Again, it's basically a new game, so better just try it 😅