Patch 1.2: a slight (yet significant) overhaul

Kept y'all waiting, hun?

Glib intro aside, I want to thank all y'all who have given my little no-budget strategy RPG a spin. I'm honestly quite proud of this game, warts and all, and it was a lot of fun to put something out people can actually literally play and enjoy.

That said, there'd always been some things I wanted to tweak. The art assets, namely. So let's talk about what Patch 1.2 is, what's new, and why it exists.

Iconography and Apocrypha
I've always been someone who's loved magic and the like in SRPGs like Fire Emblem, but I've never been hugely enamored with the default spell assets, and recolors of them, that I've used to put together the two games that I've put out so far. So...I figured I wanted to finally give them their due and give the art a bit of a personal polish I felt was maybe lacking before.

• All tomes got new, shiny icons designed by yours truly, and most got new animations (sourced from lovely creators of such, Dreams Circle).
• Staves also got new icons across the board, partly to fix the issue of a lot of status-inflicting staves looking the same in the original releases of this game.
• Status effects got a mostly new batch of icons to add a bit of personality and to provide some visual clarity where it made sense to.

• Two new characters, Mikhail and Alesha, are now able to be recruited.
• A new weapon, a magic bow called Volcaetus, is now available (if you can find it).
• Steal is now properly able to steal weapons! That said, most weapons are heavy, so good luck. But this is a change that should help the thieves to stand out a bit better.
• Growth rates were buffed on several characters to help sharpen their identities and give them a niche.
• For Casual Mode, Alistair starts with an exclusive skill that passively increases stats of your entire army, meant to help smooth out the difficulty.
• Hard Mode now has more careful stat adjustments that affect all enemies on a map, as well as several additional enemy placements.

There are a couple additional tweaks here and there, like some new conversations and typo corrections, which will probably go until the heat death of the universe.

Additional Notes
While I do not acutely intend on more content, I think it occasionally will make sense to add in new material and adjust what's already there, and I do plan to keep making adjustments as I conceive of them. I am not committing to a new patch cycle unless there are things that urgently need changing, but I would like to keep cleaning these games up and making them even better than they are.

Two additional announcements pursuant to that:

• Chronicles of Dramarith II will get the same treatment going forward. I'm expecting to release a version 1.1 patch for that game before the end of June if all goes well (which should be the case).
• Chronicles of Dramarith III is in the early stages of production. Part of why I wanted to clean up art assets was so that I could give all three games more of a personal touch, including the one currently in the works. I'm not ready to share information on it yet, but I will say that it should hopefully be my most ambitious work yet.

There may be other projects down the line, and I may move my recently published novels onto itch.io before too long, but that's a story for another day.

As always, thank you for playing! As a reminder for this, if you already have an older release of the game, the 1.2p file will be the patch to get everything up and working, while the 1.2 file is the complete package. You shouldn't need both, just one or the other.

Cheers,
J.E. Honaker