Progress Report #18: May, 2022 (Patreon)

"Ghosts from her past... from a world she no longer belonged to, but still stalking her, in her weakest moments."

Hi folks o/

Continuing on our interior map buildup, the development focus this week shifted from art to lore integration. After-all, a candy is only worth it if it tastes as good as it looks!

With Sewer and Brewery maps now conjoined with the base story, the artist passed the baton to the writers after deploying new enemy sprites to it. In turn, the writers have started work copying over quests, dialogues and backstories into the game files. Similarly, in another zone, a new map, internally named the Languishing Layover(not to be confused with a quest with the same name) went through a similar circulation. The area marks as an important location hub that will host a series of central and secondary quests that players will be incentivized to tackle, be it for lore reasons or for gaining rare rewards. Though saying anymore on this would breach into the "spoiler" territory, we still made partial mentions about the upcoming content in the PR itself.

Finally, on the combat balance side of things, the new Interfere Bot was put through initial testing, which concluded in the bot performing "underwhelming for an auxiliary". It was returned to the drawing board and reprogrammed for better stats and tacts. After-all, Caly isn't an engineer in name only. Additionally, to elevate the challenge factor, the player's ability to use PSI and Tactic skills has been restricted to "only one, per turn" i.e you can no longer que both force skills in the same turn. Fret not though, this isn't a nerf! This, with the new skill rework, will make sure that the game's combat remains strategically varied and not irritating or boring.

That summarizes everything for the week. As usual, we will keep floating our progress and some other interesting itsy bitsy content on the regular while we inch closer to the patch. Make sure to keep tabs here and on our Twitter/Discord for the latest.

On that note, we bid you farewell till the next one o/

Regards,

Cursed-Atelier Team