Your guess is as good as mine (only joking).

But in all seriousness, what's going on? Well, game development takes time, that's the honest answer. I still work on it when I get some free time, and I've been feeling great about progress! Just in hind sight, I definitely shouldn't have announced the game long before I even had a demo to release with it. As always, every thing's part of the learning process, y'know?

I haven't made a devlog update since February, so I figured now would be a good time considering I've had to update the game a couple of important things (i.e. staff credits, our developer resource sheet, remaking many assets from scratch, etc.). A lot of the work that I've been doing is just nonstop polishing with details, but that won't stop me from sharing screenshots and maybe some other goodies.

Ignoring the added tree assets, check out the new environment walls on the right-hand side! (They look like layer cake. :D)

I wanted the environment to look more rounder and less blocky, so I remade the environment assets from the ground up again to make it look more interesting. I wasn't always planning to keep the old environment walls, but I figured now would be a good time to remake it considering I'm getting started on the level-design process for the game itself after spending so much time creating the building blocks for the battle system and making sure things worked properly from when the battle started to when it ended.

Oh, and since I mentioned it beforehand, I created new environment assets to replace the old ones.



You can see on the left picture all the tree varieties we had at the time. We weren't too worried about developing the environments before because we were still pouring a lot of time into menus and the battle system, but now that that's all finished up and polished, we started putting in extra care to the environments and how we can decorate them properly. It's looking real pretty for a forest (if I do say so myself).



Not a lot has changed for the battle system since the February update this year, except for the addition of two extra enemies and a mini-boss for the game's upcoming demo as well as how certain buffs work. If it wasn't made clear, a lot of the enemies fall into "roles" on the battlefield. Some of them hit harder, others heal and support, while others try to use their health pools to protect their squishier companions... and we've been trying harder to lean into that aspect a lot more. We also added a couple of animations to make it easier to distinct between them mechanically (i.e. when a blue flash appears on an enemy, that means the next attack will ignore your defense... if there's a blue ring that appears around an enemy, they're casting a skill that will support their allies... etc.)

We want certain details like that to stick out in memory, so that when you spot it in the middle of battle, you start to learn who to prioritize in a fight to make it easier. At the end of the day, we don't want fights to turn into mindless "spamming-one-skill" mash fests because that doesn't fit the spirit of the game. (Nothing wrong if you prefer your RPGs that way, it's just not something I want if I'm making a game of my own, y'know?)



As it stands, we still got a ways to go with designing the areas to make exploring a little interesting. We'll make do with the limitations we have as of now, adding NPCs and continue developing the building blocks for NPCs and other common events. Treasure chests and save points already have complete implementation, so it's only a matter of time when we can start populating areas without making them feel empty as you explore.

Now normally I would post my socials here, but I've been a little bit of a hermit on social media as of recently... but I promise I'll keep the itch.io posted and for any important announcements, I will make it on the developer Twitter account. (I've been looking into hopping over to Bluesky for the future but who knows...)

Thanks for reading this far down into the developer log! I don't make these often because I forget to, but the next developer log will be when I implement NPCs and puzzle eventing into the game. So stick around until then!



See you next dev log! :]

~liarouji