Progress Report #19: May, 2022 (Patreon)

"Simon says... 

Greetings o/

Lets start off with the one that has been hogging the dev team's attention this month i.e brewery map(s). Fully inserted into the game code with final testing underway, the new area is now live with quests and puzzles fully implemented. According to the team, their goal for this area was to not create mind numbing riddle walls, but to attach soft hurdles in the form of basic challenges that Caly could relate to, and in turn, would allow players to pass through them with relative ease. For the context of what the nature of these challenges are... well, stick around for the patch to find out! Though we already did showcase a teaser trailer before, this time we've attached a stripped down footage showcasing the entirety of the three maps. As usual, do not trust the auto quality mode and manually switch to the best your internet can handle. If you see pixels, it's a lie!!

Meanwhile, immersion became the second most fixated thing this week with NPCs, occupying the Spaceport and Pleasure District, going under the writing team's tough scanner. The dialogues in particular have been rearranged to bring them more in line with their respective areas to give players more credence when interacting with them. Additional plans are already underway to make similar changes across other zones in the future.

Finally, continuing on the combat balancing theme, new skills and states were added to foes around the map for basic evaluations. Though we're largely satisfied with the current system, the idea is, and will always be, to keep encounters fresh. After-all, a predictable move-set, no matter how engaging, is a stale move-set, and no one really enjoys that for too long. In the same spirit, we've also made another choice based tweak whereby players can now choose to end their move with more than 50% AP remaining in order to speed up their next turn. This can be used to Caly's benefit in a multitude of ways. Be it quickly creating more distance between you and the foe to get out of a tight spot or simply doing chip damage to push the foe's hp into KO range, and then bringing the full pain quickly in the next turn, choice will be yours.

That is it for this week. Thank you for your time! We wish you a wonderful weekend and will see you in the next one o/

Regards,

Cursed-Atelier Team