Malevolent Planet 2D - Alien Biome Status Update (Patreon)

Hello! It's the end of a Tuesday, a Tuesday that marks the beginning of August which means we have yet another ambitious road ahead of us for this month's update.

It's ambitious, and because ambitious ideas sometimes can turn out not as we desire them to, we need a backup plan. I'll list a few bulletpoints as to what I'm supposed to do for this month's update:

• I need to develop a Combat System from scratch. The focus of this Combat System is to show CGs during Combat at first and make it flexible enough so that we can adopt a RPG-style progression into scenes that could play out during combat. Turn-based combat systems are too often a hit or miss, but I checked out many games (Japanese ones seem to do a good job at combat especially) and I have a few ideas that could make it fun, or at least not so boring. This is why, the main focus will be on displaying as much art/CGs during combat and to make it more exciting. I have put this decision to a vote so I'm trying to follow through.

• I need to update the current chibi/overworld sprites artstyle. I've received feedback remarking that the current crab walk is a bit awkward and that the existing chibi sprites might be a bit offputting. That's why, because we're at the point where we're going to have a bunch of new clothes for different characters (such as a spacesuit), I have sketched a new artstyle which will also include a four directional type of movement, left, down, right, up instead of just left and right. This was also put to a vote.

• I need to make sure we have CGs/actual content in this upcoming update. Because I don't know how the combat system will turn out in the short term and if it will be stable enough to show you a bunch of exciting scenes/CGs this month, I need to think about something to cover as a backup plan. On the SFW side we'll have the forest map and the lake map which can probably be reused for a few future missions and we'll also be finishing the current mission where we rescue the crewmates.

And this brings me to the NSFW side. You will likely need to subdue one of the crewmates, as they're driven into a frenzy by something unknown and this situation can maybe have a few mini scenes directed by your choices in how you approach the crewmate. The issue is that this conflicts a bit with the combat system because it's supposed to serve the same purpose, subduing the crewmate and getting him back to the ship.

Now I'm a bit tired as I'm typing this, but you can rest assured that by the end of the week I will know what to do and I'll let you know how it's going.

The combat system has many technical aspects and I'm trying my best to deal with them so that everything will be stable and flexible for what I plan it to be.

That's it for now, thanks a lot for your time and I hope you'll have a great beginning of the week :)