After a long period of radio silence I'm guess it's time to say that this time was spent working on a new content for the game: to be blunt, in it's last iteration, the game looks very shallow and boring: the locations are very empty and short, the quests are very straight-forward, and the combat system lacks overall depth. That's why it was decided to spent time overhauling those things. Today's highlight is...
COMBAT SYSTEM OVERHAUL
UNIT STATS AND DICE ROLLS
Before, one of the combat aspects was randomness. It wasn't particularly fair that the player's impact on the combat outcome was dependant on such thing, so it was decided to remove it completely. Well, almost completely, as the skills that gets shuffled into your hand and enemy behaviour (this one actually can change depending on the environment) still depend on chances, but hey, at least it's better than losing due to having 95% accuracy and still missing, right?
As such, the following stats were removed:
- Accuracy
- Evasion
- Critical Chance
Take a note that the critical damage stat is still present and is used to buff some special empowered attacks.
Along with this, there are a few stats that were added:
- Walk - determines the maximum radius a unit can move per turn. This stat was present before, but now it is officially implemented
- Readiness - determines the intervals between units' actions (we will talk about it further below)
- Fortitude - a value that affects the duration of negative effects applied on a unit
- Incoming healing - a multiplier of a unit's incoming healing
- Incoming healing - a multiplier of a unit's incoming healing
SPECIAL SKILLS
Hyper abilities were removed. Yep. The idea of having a skill that grants a unit a power spike at the cost of charging it for several turns, so, to smooth the difficulty curve a bit, they were replaced with a special skills tab: those skills are either innate to the owner, or can be obtained via various combat interactions. Try experimenting a bit! Who knows what you can find?
TURNS
The old combat turn system worked this way: you wait until you fill you Time Points gauge, then spend some of that TP to use skills or walk... which wasn't particularly balanced! I mean, there were no skills that required all of you TP, right? That is why is was decided to change it for the better: the new combat system uses act timers: act timers are activated after you use skills or move. The values of the timer, as mentioned above, are determined by the Readiness stat. Moving sets timers to only half of its duration. Using items does not activate timers at all! Once the timer is off, units can act.
BLOOD
One of the last but not the least changes: units now shed some blood depending on the circumstances (taking damage, using specific skills etc). Asides from being a cool visual addition, it actually has an impact on the gameplay!
AND ALSO...
- New skills- New status effects
- A lot of bugfixes
- General polishing and QoL additions
SO, THE DEMO?
The demo features a revamped combat encounter from the main game. To play it, you must select it in the beta branches of the game in your Steam library by going to the game's properties. Unfortunately, this will replace your base game with a demo, but you can switch back to it whenever you want.
Alternatively, if you don't own the base game (hold on, is this even possible?!), you can download it directly from the store page. Otherwise, it will be overwritten by the base game. Unfortunately, Steam does not handle separate demo build, so these are the only solutions.
To sum this up, I have to say: the last year was really hard on me and my siblings, but I still tried to work hard and finish this demo before its 2nd anniversary. Unfortunately, I did not manage to finish working on the first chapter, mainly because of my real life issues and the low income from the game sales. So I'd be really grateful if you spread the word about it in any way. The future of the game lies in your hands.
That's all for now. See you soon, Seeker...
Changed depots in demo branch