Preview: powerful and fun new items! (Patreon)

Hello everyone!

This past month I've been working exclusively on the new accessories.

The inventory screen has been updated (2nd image in the previews); up until now, that left side with the belt slots was only for show, but now players can move the cursor there, allowing for more practical and efficient item management.

This was necessary given all the new items that I'm adding and seeing as players will have to interact way more with that screen now, so I wanted to make the process of managing items much less cumbersome and thus more user-friendly.

Check out the preview images at the top of this post for teasers of new items, but just as a little example, let me tell you about the one displayed in the main GIF.

Bracer of Shielding: when Maya is crouching, an ethereal shield will deploy in front of her and all evil projectiles will be reflected back at a nearby enemy! Reflected projectiles become piercing and get a huge bonus damage too! You can see the barnacles' usually weak projectiles being reflected back with great prejudice and ultimately obliterating them.

Each powerful new item will come with drawbacks tough: notice how Maya has to be crouching and therefore stationary, the shield doesn't reflect projectiles coming from behind, it disables the crouching attack and disables throwing items in that position. This will be the main patterns: powerful items will have equivalent hard mechanical drawbacks, and other items will reduce Maya's main stats, such as -50 HP or -10% DEF.

But to counter-balance that, there will also be new basic items that are positive, such as adding things like a flat +100 HP or +20 ATK to Maya's stats.

Therefore, taking into consideration that Maya has a maximum of 8 belt slots, this will open up a lot of decision making with all of the possible builds and item configurations, allowing for players to choose a variety of different play-styles, depending on their combination of items.

Do you fill up all 8 slots with powerful items, but then suffer through all of those combined drawbacks? Or do you equip 4 complex items and then 4 simpler items to counter-balance the reduced stats? But then, how many slots do you even reserve for consumables such as health potions, mana potions, armor repair, to not even mention the new interesting consumables that I'm also adding? Because some of those powerful items may add a spirit cost to things that didn't have it before, or may increase the spirit cost of a particular skill, thus leaving Maya constantly starved for mana regeneration, while other cursed items could even slowly drain Maya's health!

I will add a cooldown to freshly equipped items, to block players from cheesing themselves out of the drawbacks in the middle of a fight. So for instance, once you equip an item in any particular belt slot, that slot becomes inactive for 10 seconds, so you can't use the consumable and the accessory effect won't take hold, until that cooldown timer runs out. Discouraging instant item swapping while still leaving room for cheeky item manipulation in the middle of a boss battle

It's been very fun working on this new feature but it is very time consuming, specially because I have to spend a lot of time under-the-hood, doing work to support all of these new interactions.

So unfortunately I will have to extend this 1-month dev cycle into August, therefore turning it into a 2-month dev cycle, resulting in no release this July. I will use the extra month to continue adding more items, while also having some extra time to add new enemies and ero animations.

Thank you very much for your time and support!

Best Regards,
Mega