After two days if intense tweaking (to not be confused with twerking! ) I think I nailed it. I used calculator and numbers, and now your party does same damage/hp ratio at level 2 like at level 40 (the level cap) of course against the same enemies. In the game I'll randomize a bit the stats of course, but before it wasn't working like this.

Also I tweaked all the skills and reverted back to SOTW system with skills costing a lot of PP, so enemies could have PP Regen, and everything is more balanced.

The main difference for those coming from SOTW is the deteriorating defense, which will prevent battles to go too long in any case, solving probably the only issue of SOTW battle system, that were the battles too long.

Now I remove 10% of current defense every time you hit the target X times (depending on their Resilience values) and this way the defense drop is bigger early in the battle, but lower at the end so you can still turn the tides of a battles.

Yes I'm very pleased.

Now I'm looking forward to seeing some players demolish completely my ideas as always

The main difference for those coming from SOTW is the deteriorating defense, which will prevent battles to go too long in any case, solving probably the only issue of SOTW battle system, that were the battles too long.

The other problem was too many trash battles, especially if you were unlucky in the coliseum. I think there were something like 425 battles including the expansion, and while the boss fights and cutscene ones were great, the trash encounters were repetitive.

Actually I remember an user (fabula) who took time to play all the battles in Loren and compared to SOTW. In the end, surprisingly, the required battles in SOTW were more or less the same as Loren.

The automatic battles of PS2 will help under this aspect too though, you can pause the battle, use some skills (the AI won't use them) and then put back the auto-fight. I tried it a bit and it works and is also moderately fun. Not someting you can do often at higher difficulty levels, but it's possible if you have a party well equipped

I am coding this game in a different way though. There are game overs due to tough battles of course, but in general I'm using another approach:

- for Easy/Normal you probably won't need to do much grinding or complete side-quests

- for Hard/Nightmare, beside of course grinding and optimizing skills/equipment, there will be some timed side-quest (not all, but some are) that give good XP and money rewards.

So the difficulty won't be just "beat battle X against boss Y" but also "finish that sidequest in time by going in the right places in time". Hard to explain with words, once I put the beta out will be more clear

Today after fixing various critical bugs, I resumed writing some camp talk dialogues.

After this not much left to have the first chapter finished. I'm not sure if I'll make in time for end of month but shouldn't be much longer

And I'm at about 71k words for the script right now. Considering it's the first draft, unedited (usually editing they add some stuff so it's longer) and not even the full 1st chapter I think this game maybe won't be as long as Cursed Lands with its epic 300k-something words, but for sure over 220-230k words!

Just sent to SilverHyena (who did a great editing job for Cursed Lands) the camp talk, while today/tomorrow I finish the first chapter main plot. Then, I'll have to write and code the rebel version, since obviously while the main plot has many common points there are also many variants and specific side-quest. This game probably would have been impossible for an external writer to write well, too many variants



I suspect the first chatper only will end close to 80-90k words. Definitely another... SMALL GAME! (tm)

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just added OPTIONAL level scaling. This should make everyone happy. Some people (like me lol) might like to go back to a level 3 encounter once you're level 5 and crush the enemies easily, while others might want to always have a challenge. The XP reward will change based on the difficulty, so there will be a reason in doing it too.

Wording tweak:



I think you should name the setting "Dynamic Enemy Levels" and rename "False" to "Default". I know why you called it False, but that's coding lingo and is likely confusing to non-technical players.

I like Dynamic Enemy Levels wording I'll use that and actually I didn't use "False" lol, I used Off in the menu! But when I wrote the help text I just read the variable value

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So I added back the HP/PP regen, basically as it was in SOTW, because while testing it was much more fun to play with regenerating stats than fixed bonus increases. Since there's the deteriorating armor/defense in this game, there won't be the risk of battles going too long as it was in SOTW

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Since there are going to be many items I've added an option in the vendor to filter based on item rarity. I will add that to the player's inventory too

I did more testing today, in particular the final boss battle at end of chapter1, and even if I'm cautious to say it, I'm really happy how the gameplay turned out. In this game getting the right equipment is SUPER important, more than in SOTW. Of course also using the right skills but I have made it in a way that you cannot constantly spam powerful skills (something you could do in all my previous games) so now you need to think more carefully when to use the skills.

Final boss battle in Normal difficulty, with some key member equipped with Epic items = autobattle won it

Final boss battle in Hard difficulty, with some key member equipped with Epic items = autobattle lost because didn't use skills. I played it using the right skill and managed to win but for not much. I also tried with a worse equipment (Rare items and no Epic) and lost 3 times out of 4. I also tried Nightmare I won 1 time out of 5 attempts! haha



I think SOTW fans will love this and even those who complained that Cursed Lands was too much on the easier side.

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finished playtesting the demo playing as Empire and it's about 3h. I did all the sidequests (not all the random encounters though!) and in some cases I used a cheat-mode to instantly win some fights (I had already tested them before and had no time to lose!).

The side-quests are very similar for rebel but the main quest no, so now I'll work on that. For sure completing the demo playing both sides will take 5h. Not bad I think. This seems to be another... SMALL GAME (tm)

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the latest big gameplay change was to modify the Heavy weapon damage to be AOE by default. They were already slow to load/fire, but doing good damage. But then, they would have been very similar to Rifle/Sniper Rifle (even if they have higher critical values).

So I had this enlightement and I must say it's great to play! Now this kind of weapon has more "personality"

Off to write the Rebel-side of the main plot this week. I still think should be able to finish the demo by mid-February!

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as posted on twitter, I'm facing a dilemma! In the game there are various secondary NPCs. They’re seen for like 5 seconds in secondary missions. The original artist is gone, and I asked another artist but the difference is noticeable. Better to not display them at all instead ? My gut feeling is that is better not. I still use them as enemies during some fights (yep you can fight against armed civilians! wooth) so it wasn't wasted money.

I think the art style is a little too different there.

In a few japanese games I've played long ago (sorry, can't remember their names), they often used 'shadows' for the secondary NPCs (for example, the "Outpost Leader" here need to be enlarged a little -it's smaller than the protagonist- and entirely blackened to Shadow status -you want a recognizable silhouette, not different art-).

It's cheaper, and has a long history in japanese theatre (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuroko).

Yes I already made my mind to not use them. I might use the shadow idea though

In other news, the first chapter of the game is already longer than the first game full story Definitely this is going to be another SMALL GAME (tm)!

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Began coding/designing the second chapter areas. I made my mind that even if the first chapter is basically ready (editor is working on the texts but everything else is done) I will wait until I have also the full second chapter finished. This way people who pre-order the game at least can play about half of it. Right now if you pre-ordered you could play little more than the demo and isn't a great deal

It's a shame that original artist is gone. I hope you got all the art assets you need.

Yes the most important ones are secured! lol

That is: the main cast plus all the camp talk/romance scenes. Maybe I'll use those secondary NPCs as enemies (they're shown much smaller so they're fine).

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I also asked Deji to fix some details, since I added bonus outfit (and sexy/naked versions) to all characters, but some people on FB made me notice that this new artist (not the original one) work could be improved in particular in the muscles, so asked Deji to fix it (or at least improve it haha). The females have less problems luckily