Here’s for some devlog updates and changes the game went through in the engine exchange! First I would like to let you all know that the first months after the campaign were spent mostly with planning and me trying to coding the shmup. I didn’t want to change anything later in development, so I spent almost all of my time making GDD notes to make everything clear for programmers to implement and for me to remember. That meant a lot of changes in how a lot of stuff worked before. Until the last day of campaign I didn’t thought I would change engines, but with the Xbox One stretch Goal unlocked that became inevitable, and to be honest, I’m somewhat glad that it happened like this. I’ll be able to have way more control over the system now that I’m planning everything out by myself. In RPG Maker is easy for just make stuff without a lot of planning so it turns into a vicious cycle xD I liked the freedom that gave, but it’s also nice (and needed) to plan stuff out. I’m also having a lot of fun on how things are going now! :3 As for the changes:
Character building, in both stats and equipment, has been overhauled:
Each character will have 5 passive equipment slots as well as up to 8 active slots.
Equipment has been changed as to not directly give everything. Stats and skills together in the same package made it not only hell to balance but offered limited flexibility in certain situations. With the new system, there is more players can do directly with their equipment by differing stats from skills granted.
The five passive slots will pretty much function as they did before, with a few tweaks.
Ribbons won't simply raise a little bit more of your stats per level up when equipped. They will give 3 Talent points to be spent in Talent Constellations.
(new main menu made for an easier access to the tabs needed! It looks pretty cool, right? The coding for the menu is being done by @veyerals who’s super experienced at that! You guys should check their game!)
These constellations will belong to one of each Quality. To complete Constellations, players will need to spend the points they earned by Level up through the equipped Ribbon. Points will differ depending on Ribbon: a perfectionist Ribbon (the one you start the game with) will give a point of each Quality while a Amethyst Bow Tie will reward characters with 3 Cardinal points directly. In that way you can build Virgo for all qualities or specialize to different gameplays through the constellation tree!
When spending these points, characters can raise attributes or specific stats such as Speed or Criticals. They may also gain benefits for completing entire Constellations in the form of Seals but I’ll talk about that later on.
As for Skills:
The battle commands have been revamped; characters can be equipped with 4 Purges being respective to one of each Directional Key. Each Directional slot skill can be quickly cast in combat as a measure to have players spend the least amount of time scrolling through menus.
Each slot will represent a Targeting type. One for self/allied cast skills, another for Melee attacks, one for Ranged attacks and spells and another for Area of Effect spells.
The first slot will be reserved for Defensive abilities such as Guards, which instead of lowering damage received in the turn they are used, will grant an additional life bar called Armor. Armor will take damage from enemy attacks instead of Hearts when up. This will last indefinitely but won't be as strong as a direct damage reduction, which will occur during Timed Defense sequences, but more about that later²!
Weapon Melee Attacks will function similarly to how they did before, with the addition of Timed Hits as well as Purity Recovery. They can only hit the frontmost enemy in their formation, which will follow the same rules as the Party.
Ranged attacks may target any enemy in battle and are the most likely to include debuffs on them. Unlike the old system, these may have a variety of animations much like weapon attacks!
Area attacks will hit all enemies at once, at a higher cooldown and cost, but giving out a stronger result! Much like ranged ones, these can have special animations depending on which skill is used (bless Anglerman for helping me out with animations now, else I would be dead in a pile of work).
Whenever a new skill is found, bought or crafted, they can be equipped to their respective slot and eventually upgraded through crafting to further raise their strength.
Changes in Counter-Attacks:
In addition to these, counter-attacks will follow the same pattern for both being independently equipped per character and utilizing the Slots System for targeting.
Once an enemy hits a character that has performed a Perfect Block, they'll have a few seconds to decide between one of 4 different currently equipped Counter-Attacks.
They might heal themselves as a countermeasure, much like Musashi did in his Red Moon Stance, hit foes really hard, Burn them down or explode on all enemies at once! Counters will also feature cooldowns and costs to balance them out, but single-target melee counters will always go free much like weapon attacks!
I hope that these additions will make combat both more fun and challenging as well as much easier to understand than before.
A lot of player feedback has been considered and now all information given to players will be more intuitive, as well as effects being more visual, causing a lot less confusion! I’ve been working really hard on this hoping to improve everything on the game, and now with help also from @unicornfan who’s working with stats and database as of now development is moving faster! Aaaand, sorry for this long post =|