Dev Blog #28 (Patreon)

Hey everyone!  I hope you're all doing well :)

I just wanted to give a quick update on our progress and what we've been working on.  

All focus has been on developing the adventure system and we've been holding steady with no scope creep which has been amazing so far.

Pale Horse has been strictly focused on leading and designing the nitty gritty of the adventure system.  He has a lot of the foundation setup now and has working very steady (when he can between family, work, life, etc) and has been really creating something special. 

Pale Horse and I had a meeting yesterday and today to look over the Adventure System design doc (18 pages) lol.  I know I keep iterating on "adventure system" this and "adventure system" that but it's a pretty massive module.  It's essentially another game altogether and will be used as the primary gamified engine of Lyla's Curse.  This module will contain a conflict system (battle system), questing with scripted and randomized adventure systems, boss fights and separate inventory management.  

From a user standpoint, we're not going for some next level strategy game here, we're keeping it pretty simple from the user side, but in order to obtain that simplicity up front, under the hood is going to be incredibly complex (but in a good way).  The battle system will be a sort of hybrid between traditional jrpg and beat-em-up style gameplay so you get to control a chibi Lyla beating the fuck out of some mythical beasts and demons.

I (Voodoo Monkey) have been focused on Art direction, story development, writing and art asset generation and large scope design for the Adventure module.  Lately, I've been focused primarily on designing the new armors for the rest of the team and producing their final sprite designs.  I posted preview in the #patreon channel of the Discord server with a heavy spoiler warning.  I'll make another preview post for patrons here as well.  

After coming up with a final character design for Stephan and Shamus, I was very inspired by their new lore and redesigned Lyla's armor again to match their new aesthetic.  I went through so many iterations for all of the characters and now I've reached designs that I'm very happy with.  So character sprite are has been completed for those characters.  

With this, there's still fair bit of work ahead of us, I still need to draw all of the combat animations, UI, write a lot of randomized scenes and various dialogues and story progression but we're making really good progress I feel.

Anyways, that's a quick summary of what we've been focused on.  We're really having a lot of fun with this now that we've locked down the full direction for the adventure system.  Thanks for your continued support and following along with development, I've got some fun gif's coming your way shortly :)  You guys are the best!