Development Update 1

Thank you to everyone who played my demo and gave me feedback! It really means the world to me. I've been working on this game for quite some time now and with a lot of trepidation that it might not be any fun at all, but I'm glad to see people enjoying it. I'll be making update posts once a month as I continue working away.

The first order of business since wrapping up the demo has been: New Skills! I decided to push forward with the bare bones in the first demo to stop things from getting too involved, but I've had a lot of ideas that I'm keen to expand upon, and I thought I'd talk through them here for anyone interested:

• Savage
  • This is a pretty simple category of skill but one that I'm hoping will add some fun defensive play. "Savage" is a flag on a skill that causes it to deal double damage if it hits a target with 0 block. In other words, it's really dangerous if your shields are down, but if you can get even a single point of block you're much better off. As you can imagine, Savage is mostly intended for enemies. I find a lot of fun and tension in swappin the party around to make sure everyone's well defended, and this adds an extra risk.
  • The flip side to savage is a new defensive ability that uses the same flag, but on a shielding skill. If you use it on someone who already has block, it'll grant a modest sum, but on an ally who has been broken it will grant double the amount of block. In the first demo I had trouble balancing Aegis - too strong and it made shield stacking really attractive- and really boring! - too weak and it you just can't keep up. I'm hoping this version offers a strong triage option.
• Better Swaps
  • Swap is hard coded in the first demo, but I've broken that up since to give a bit more variety in the ways to interact with swapping. So now swap is a skill, and there's an improved version that some characters have access to which allows them to swap any frontline character, not just themselves, with any backline character.
  • On top of that, enemies can now boot player characters off the frontline, or yank them back in! I think this sort of ability will be rare, especially as it stomps all over the player's turn, but there's big dramatic potential for bosses who yeet threatening characters and drag vulnerable ones back into the melee.
• Followups
  • This was quite a fiddly category to put together, but now some skills can have a second skill as a followup to achieve two effects at once. The first of these is a hit-and-run, like 'U-Turn' in Pokemon, letting a character strike and then swap off onto the backline in a single turn. The other skills combine dealing damage with shielding.
• Interruptibles
  • This is a flag on skills intended for enemies - causing them to reset their planned turn if they take damage before it completes. In the first demo there were very few enemies with block because there was really no difference, but I think interruptible skills would create a good distinction here. Enemies with block can't be interrupted until they're broken. The enemies in the first demo didn't have a ton of mechanical variety - they did AOE attacks or they did single target attacks, and they had more or less health and damage, but that was about it. I'm hoping that with savage attacks, shielding and interruptibles there'll be more strategy to picking your targets.

After skills, I've been looking at passive abilities to give characters another dimension beyond the options open to them in the menu. These are called Traits, and I'm hoping to have a wide range of them in the next demo.

• Counter & Gallant
  • Counter is pretty straight forward and as you might expect, counter attack when struck. Gallant has an extra condition- the character will counter attack as long as they have some amount of block.
• Berserk
  • This is one I'm very excited about, a passive trait that makes the character boost their damage output every turn they're on the frontline, but it resets after they swap. This creates a character with the opposite incentive to the one-and-done mages, one that wants to hang around for absolutely as long as possible, getting more and more dangerous, but also putting themselves more and more at risk. An anti-boss character who can shine in big horde encounters.

All these are implemented on the technical side, but I still have a lot of work to do, especially on the graphical front.

Next time I'm hoping to have some UI work to share, retooling some of the more clashing visual elements to something that feels more consistent. Please look forward to it!