In this update : - Abilities (previously named "Spells") have their description texts updated to be more descriptive, precise and I corrected the inaccuracies and missing parts. - Random encounters, that I've decided to remove because they were very buggy, have been put back, corrected and improved a lot. These will make the game a bit less difficult and you will be able to grind if you ever fall behind on levels or money. Random encounters pay less than normal ones, though. - I've put back xp adjustment for difficulty of encounters because of the previous point. When you fight very hard enemies, xp will be increased and decreased if encounters are below your party level. - A cavern at the end of the game was covered with grass, and has been corrected. - I realized that the game cannot be described as an "Action" tactical RPG. I thought that being real-time and that the speed of the game made it eligible to the title, and when I checked the definition, it seemed that my game fitted in. But I checked back and it doesn't, because you don't have direct control of characters. I'll change the trailer, the store page and everything that has the description "Action" RPG and correct that. I'm beginning to work on the next game these days, while also improving Invasion. I've created the base program structure and I'm really happy with what I've come up with. It will be incredibly easier than this game, I'm dropping everything that didn't work well in "Invasion" and that is too complex, and use Unity at it's best. I've learned a ton while working on this game, and I realized that I tend to make things too complicated, and it creates huge structures that are really hard to work with and slows development down considerably, and it constrains me more that it helps if I just used Unity at it's best. Unity is really good, seriously.

A small update that corrects these things : - Improve the interface displaying party characters at the start of the game and in party creation. Cleaner, better looking, more complete. - Lightning Strike now more powerful and stuns enemies. - More intense lighting when outside. - Changed the name from "Spells" to "Abilities" in the whole game. Makes more sense for special attacks and things like that. - Some other minor improvements.

In this update : - Dead party members gain XP for combats even if they are dead. Changed this because you could lose a lot of xp if you played at high difficulty levels, where losing party members in combat is frequent, which means lower levels at the end of the game, making it even harder. - Solved the bug where terrain textures here scaled wrong when the player exits caves. - Interior maps are less dark. - You can now choose the combat rank (front, middle, rear) of your characters in party creation. - Repaired the bug with skill "Powerful shots" where it was extremely powerful... - The bug that a player reported in the previous update (black screen) has been checked and the problem is a rare conflict between unity, steam and the devices configuration specific to his computer. - Some other small things. - New website, new trailer, new screenshots...

The game is coming very, very close to the end. The next one could very well be the final update. The game could be published in this state, but there are still things that would benefit from some work. So, here is what's new in this update : - Much improved dungeon styles, and created much better particle effects for traps. What was there before was mostly placeholder, now it's the real thing. - Improved the interface style. - Spell's EP costs and reset timer for hits and shots are now adjusted by weapon attack time. Hitting with a dagger costs 3 EP less but 2 more with a battleaxe. Same adjustments for timers. - Hit, shot and projectile spells now reset the timer for every other spells of these types. This prevent spamming the enemy with attacks, which can be overpowered... and a brainless way to win fights. Don't want of that in my game. - Reduced the strengths of all armors, which raise all damages in the game. Makes warriors in general less powerful and balanced. - Adjusted the lighting level for outside maps (was too dark). - You can now decide the rank of your characters in combat (front, middle, rear) instead of the game putting them automatically according to it's stats and equiped weapon. - The spell targeting circle will now change it's color to grey when out of sight of the caster, so it's way easier to see where you can target AOE spells like fireball. It will also show an X for spells where you need to choose a target which is out of sight. - A sound effect will clearly indicate when you are making something that doesn't work, like using a spell without the necessary EP or targeting a character out of sight with a spell. - Closing tutorial and dialog windows don't make each characters in the fight chose a new target anymore. - Solved the problems that appeared when you changed the name of your savegame. - Removed multihit and multishot spells. These were buggy at first, but when I solved the bugs, I realized they were seriously overpowered and they unbalanced the game. - Reduced silver received after combat a little bit from previous update. The silver ratio is *really* hard to get right, it changed during the whole development and it's a real puzzle to get just right. And most changes I make to the game world or system can result in debalancing what was ok before. - Some new hair styles for party characters. - A lot of other minor things and bugs solved. For those who would be curious to know, I'm looking to have the game published for the launch by a publisher. I'm not good at marketing, and I really don't like to do it too, and publishers do this part and other parts that I lack on my own. My first choice is Paradox Interactive, I really like their business philosophy and think they would be very good partners. The more I know of them, the more I like them. They also have a large following of players who play niche, complex games. Really hope they will publish it, but if they don't, I'll just look for other publishers, there are a lot of them. This game is finished and there is almost zero risk for them, so it shouldn't be too hard.

Hi everyone, In this update, I've corrected some problems that were there with the new spell system. I've made a lot of testing and tested most spells thoroughly. I've remade the last part of the game to remove unnecessary/less fun parts, and concentrated the fun and special parts. I've changed the XP curve to reduce the levels of characters a bit at the end of the game. I've remade the environments textures and now everything outside looks and feels better than before. And a lot of random small things. I'm very happy with these recent changes and I want to finish the game as fast as I can. The game is as good as I want it to be. I just need to be sure that everything works correctly, and maybe make some little changes/improvements.

In this update, I've finished what I told I was working on in the previous update. - In combat, you can now see HP bars (which also show injuries) over the head of characters and enemies, but only when you press Alt. I've tried letting these bars all the time but it was annoying and getting in the way of mostly all other combat information. These bars also appear and stay over the head of party characters that have 3 injuries or under 60% HP, so it's easy to see when you need to heal them. - There is also an arrow that shows you which is the target of every character/enemy. These are hidden at all time but shown in these cases : when a character/enemy chooses a new target (by player intervention or by AI), it shows his arrow for half a second. When you point your cursor on a character/enemy, it shows the arrow to his target. - Floating texts (ex: damage numbers) are now scaled for distance (instead of always the same size). - When pointing an enemy, a small window opens to show it's name, power, HP bar with hp / max hp, and injuries. This replaces simple text showing these same info. - Repaired bugs that were from the previous update, one of which came from a new armor special power. Made the game freeze at the start of combats. Another one was making instant kills of enemies, with very loud death cries. There are good chances that bugs still remain in the game after the recent changes. I'll do my best to find and correct them as soon as possible. Most of the time, reseting the game will correct the problem. A small video demonstrating the changes in this update : https://youtu.be/aAYlS7g__ok

Hi everyone, I've taken some much needed vacations this summer and I'm back to working on the game. In this new update, here's what I've done : - 15 new weapon and armor special/magical powers. - The icon of all weapons, armors and rings now have a small number indicating its level, or shows the number of items in each stack of that item (like potions). This makes it a lot easier to browse a merchant's inventory or yours. - A button to reorganize the inventory. This regroups items and potions in stacks at the top of inventory, and then place equipment in order of value. It also automatically organize inventory for merchants and loot, which makes them way cleaner. - Repaired the bug where after playing the tutorial and party creation, the game restarted when you started a new game. - Repaired the bugs with resizing the main game interface (character portraits with spells and weapons). - After combats, the game take a bit more time to show achievements and solved quests, not to overwhelm the player with too much info at the same time. - Improved the tutorial with some new instructions that, I found out, were lacking. - Stats in characters stats window show a more precise value, with adjustments for many spells that weren't there before. - Repaired the bug where special powers on ranged weapons did not work (inflict weakness or other magic effects). - Weapons stats shown in the small window are more detailed. These days I focus a lot on improving the gameplay and user experience, and improving simplicity of use. In my list of things to do are health bars over the head of characters (and enemies but only shown when you point them with the cursor). Also, when giving an order to character(s), it will show for a very short time a curved line (like pathfinder kingmaker) to the enemy(s) targeted by all selected characters. When you point the cursor to a character or enemy it will show this target line. If you would like to see something improved in the game, now is a perfect moment to ask :)

The base game is finished! And I've beat the game in 23 hours. Every part of the game is complete, and it's playable from the beginning to the end, almost bug free. I will still improve things until I feel the game is completely to my taste. Here is what has been improved in this update : - A lot of spell bugs were corrected, and spell and effects were balanced. Some spells were removed because they were too complicated to balance, and didn't add anything really good to the game (all spells affecting luck). I must admit, the spell update made a mess of the game and I published the update too fast with not enough testing. I generally take more time to correct almost everything before publishing but this time I didn't. Lesson learned. - Divided spells into tiers. The more you advance in the game, the more you have access to new spells. Most of the new recent spells were not appropriate for the beginning of the game. The higher tier spells are not more powerful, they are more complex in their use and meant to complement the spells from lower tiers. - I reduced the spell learning cost a lot, so players can try more spells. - Reduced the effect of healing spells, and reduced the injury healing from each HP healed. This makes the game more difficult and force players to think more about defense, offense and good tactics and less just reacting by healing as the melee fighters get hurt. Injuries will stay a lot more and you don't want your characters to get hurt. - Changed the XP needed for leveling. Higher levels rise faster. - When you point a party character or enemy with the cursor, it shows a small window with every effect on it with power and time remaining. This was already in the previous update but I forgot to write about it. - Improved the lighting, ambiance and look of interior environments. - Some quest and script bugs corrected. What I'm doing next : - New attack and area of effect damage spells, especially for melee characters with more spectacular particle effects. - More special, magical characteristics for weapons and armors, with some specific for some kind of equipments (ex: mage robes with effects that help mages). - Improve environments. Place more details and make each place more unique. - Continue debugging, obviously. I might work on other things, but for the moment this is what I have in mind.

Hi everyone, The few very recent updates are solving problems that appeared with the new spells update (spells that didn't work correctly, particles that didn't show, etc.) and bugs that came from a conflict with the tutorial when creating a new party and starting a new game. It also solve a bug that I seriously don't understand how the H*** it got there and it ruins the game if you played since the last big update. When you got in the first village after the first map traveling in the wild, instead of entering the village, you were sent into a cavern at the end of the game. I've placed a shortcut to send you back to the start of the game if it happened to you (alt-shift-r). Very sorry for that. Also, I've completed the game, what remains is testing the last 6 hours and making the last fight better/more unique. I will not call it complete until this is done. And thoroughly testing all new spells for balance. This part of the game is playable right now, it's just not tested yet. Also, for the moment there are two spells that don't work : Multihit and Multishot. The new spell system is incompatible with the way these spells worked before, and these two are quite tricky. I'm working on correcting this right now.

In this update, I improved the spell and effects system, and added 38 new spells which mostly use 21 spell effects. Here is the list of new spells by category: Warrior : Battlecry, Break Armor, Dispel Burst, Guard, Provoking Shout, Raidant Aura. Fighter : Battle Vigor, Defensive Stance, Draining Aura, Draining Hits, Ignore Pain, Offensive Stance, Rage. Rogue : Assassinate, Black Curse, Bleeding Strike, Charm, Confusion Powder, Deadly Aim, Luck, Run, Smoke Cloud, Sneak. Archer : Alertness, Bleeding Shot, Breaking Shot, Slow. White Mage : Dispel, Energize Group, Group Power, Mass Dispel, Resist Magic, Summon Guardian, Toughen Group. Black Mage : Confuse, Curse, Mass Confusion, Pain. These new spells are quite good to adapt to specific situations. They are mostly complementary to those that already exist in the game, and offer a lot more choices to broaden the party's abilities. A thing I changed with the way spells work is making it more... universal, unified. Spells now work all in one simpler, cleaner system. To create a new spell effect, I just need something like 3 to 6 lines of code, and create one particle effect with my new particles editor that I love. I also made a new system for particles that let me create new particle styles for spell effects inside my editor, it works really fast, is extremely easy to use and the effects it makes look a lot better too. I also made an editor to create spells inside my editor instead of directly programming them, which is awesome for me. You won't see any difference, but with it I can improvise spells specific to enemies in very little time, so enemies will now have more spells that fit their individual styles. What I will work on next is just finishing the game scenario/world. I think that I've unconsciously put making the end on hold because I'm such a perfectionist, I don't want the end to be just average. I've redone most of the map for the last 6 hours because I wasn't satisfied, it was not on par with the rest of the game world. Now I just need to make about 6 maps (about 4 hours of gameplay) to finish. I need to say, I have a tendency to change plans and to try to improve everything I made previously... and it has been a bad thing for this project. It took too much time because of that. The thing is, I want to change this tendency, so I pledge to focus on finishing the game.... and debugging the current problems. That's it, I've pledged it, now I need to just finish the damn game. After it's finished, I'll continue to improve it, but it will be a good thing rather than a problem.

So here is the update that took a while to make. I could not update sooner because the game was a mess, due to the deep changes I made in the base program. This update is a little hasty, because I said I would publish it within the week, but very close to complete. There are things that are still a bit buggy that I will correct very soon. So here's what's been improved : - Enemies now act as part of groups, instead of acting as individuals. They take decisions based on their group, and will join fights that their group take part of. They also revive their fallen allies after combat if the whole group was not eliminated. This changes some parts of gameplay where you could just defeat 2 or 3 enemies, retreat and come back and have an easy fight, or where you could pull some enemies at a time and defeat them. Now this tactic will not work, if one enemy sees you, they alert their whole group. Also, enemy's AI were very buggy when you fled combat, and this way of working as a group solved everything. - There are now unique enemy characters everywhere in the game map, and they talk to the party when they meet you in combat. Every unique character has his own, unique stats and style, leads a group of enemies and has something stupid to say. They are generally pretty strong and will often make the fight revolve around them. - The story of the game is now more defined, with new dungeons, quests and things to do. What was meant for later in the game is now placed sooner. Also, generic encounters of enemies have been reduced so that most combats have a light "theme" or story to them. - You can now grind against random groups of enemies that appear after you defeat the base enemies in a map. These enemies give less treasure than normal. Before, every enemy in the map that was killed was dead forever, and if you lacked money and was not able to beat your way through a part of the game, you could be in a very bad position. - You have to defeat a whole group of enemies to get treasures and experience points. Also, the XP the group gives are adjusted if you fight enemies stronger or weaker than your party. Beating enemies much stronger than your party will give a LOT of XP, and grinding at easy enemies will pay very little. - Pathfinding is now way faster (no more 0.2 second lag when moving the party) and doesn't have the problems is had before (sometimes characters took weird and obviously sub-optimal paths.) - A bunch of new powerful spells like lightning strike, inferno, poison cloud, healing circle have been added, as well as summon spells (wolf and bat) and others. - The characters now take positions in three ranks for exploration : rogues take place in the middle rank so they are much less targeted at the beginning of combats, and this gives them way better survivability. - Almost all terrain textures have been redone with a better style. - The base UI has been made smaller. - Traveling to discovered travel points don't use Travel orbs anymore, it's free. - Life orbs and party resurrection is now less expensive. - The game is generally less punishing of mistakes, to compensate for difficulty added by enemy groups working together and reviving their allies. - You can now see in the minimap the direction the camera is pointing at, so it's way easier to orient yourself. - Other minor things that I did not think of yet. There are two changes I made, but that I didn't keep : I transfered the project to Unity 5.6.5, but doing so made the the environments (terrain and grass) look awful, and there were terrible bugs with weapon particles. So I reverted back to unity 5.4.5. Another thing I wanted to do was make combats a different part from exploration. What I mean is that you explore the world like in JPRGs, with one character (the leader) and when you encounter enemies, you start as a combat against a group of enemies. I did it for many reasons : simplify my program (it's awfully complex and hard to work with, even if I always try to make things simple... to many simple things still make a complex network), to avoid players using the cheap tactics that I describe previously, and for other reasons. I didn't keep it because it broke immersion a LOT, but really, it was not good. Yet it was this change that made me use groups of enemies rather than placing individuals, and I'm really, really happy with the change it does to the game, solves the main problems I had.

The world map is finished, with all environments and enemies placed. The story is complete, everything is decided for the whole game. What remains is integrating some of these it in the game, mostly dungeons and caverns. And cleaning the mess I do when I work on the game. I post this to give news on the game, but it is not ready to play, unfortunately. I really cannot publish an update right now, because the game is kind of a mess. And after these, I need to make balance tests. One of the biggest problems with this game is that it is so long to make tests... every run of the game takes 15-20 hours. Each change I do takes a while to test, so I only do these test after many changes and a lot of work. The current, unpublished messy version of the game I have, has a bit too low XP, and way too much money. Like, you can buy everything you want really fast in the game. I really want to make money valuable, and that finding more makes players excited for what they can buy, and lacking money is a good thing, looking forward to buy what they want for their party. This balance is really hard to achieve, because adding a dungeon means adding treasures, XP to what players had in another version, so... things need adjusting after every change. One dungeon can be enough to give players all they wanted, and not look for treasures as much as they did before. I will publish a new version as soon as I will have something balanced and complete until at least the 20th hour of gameplay, or maybe final. The final game will be 23 or 24 hours long. Finishing at this point should not be long. It will be a first "final" version, meaning that changes/improvements will still be made, but players will at least be able to play the whole game.

The world map is finished, with all environments and enemies placed. The story is complete, everything is decided for the whole game. What remains is integrating some of these it in the game, mostly dungeons and caverns. And cleaning the mess I do when I work on the game. I post this to give news on the game, but it is not ready to play, unfortunately. I really cannot publish an update right now, because the game is kind of a mess. And after these, I need to make balance tests. One of the biggest problems with this game is that it is so long to make tests... every run of the game takes 15-20 hours. Each change I do takes a while to test, so I only do these test after many changes and a lot of work. The current, unpublished messy version of the game I have, has a bit too low XP, and way too much money. Like, you can buy everything you want really fast in the game. I really want to make money valuable, and that finding more makes players excited for what they can buy, and lacking money is a good thing, looking forward to buy what they want for their party. This balance is really hard to achieve, because adding a dungeon means adding treasures, XP to what players had in another version, so... things need adjusting after every change. One dungeon can be enough to give players all they wanted, and not look for treasures as much as they did before. I will publish a new version as soon as I will have something balanced and complete until at least the 20th hour of gameplay, or maybe final. The final game will be 23 or 24 hours long. Finishing at this point should not be long. It will be a first "final" version, meaning that changes/improvements will still be made, but players will at least be able to play the whole game.

Hi everyone, The next things that will most probably get in the game are things that will improve the contents, gameplay and fun in the first 14 hours of the game. All of these will be inserted to replace parts of the beginning of the game. It might mean that players already into the game would be better off restarting... but the new contents will make it worthwhile. I played the whole game like... 30 times, probably more? And I'm not even tired... ok maybe a little. :P But it's highly replayable, in my opinion. Just try a new group... 1) I will add a bit of fun and diversity to combats by placing powerful named, unique enemy characters/bosses. These will talk when entering battle, to challenge, insult or taunt the party characters, and for some of them, when they die. Later in development process, they will probably have voice added... like most of the main dialogs in the game. I aim for 6 to 8 unique characters of each main enemy groups, maybe 10 for goblins. 2 to 5 for side enemy groups. They are very fun for me to make, and quite easy too with the engine I programmed. These characters are 100% sure to give their (quite good) equipment for loot, and sometimes, with a special item, that I describe later. 2) A very special, magical item that you can buy will let you absorb magical energies that flow in special places around the game world. Every magical absorption will imbue this magical item with new powers that will improve the whole party. 3) I will redo some parts of the beginning areas to have more places of interest. I want the game world to be packed with interesting things to do and explore, and less generic combats. Maybe it will be a bit crazy and unrealistic, but it's more fun like that. Fun beats realistic. 4) More diversity in enemies. Spitting spiders, more undead types (with elites/uniques), slimes, etc. 5) Possibly 2 or 3 additional dungeons. Maybe even more. 6) Making the main quest advance much earlier in the game. Taking what was for later and making it at the start, then it continues for the whole game. 7) Character classes. But non-restrictive character classes, that only improve your power. Not sure I'll call it a "class". They will give bonus stats, skills/passive powers unique to that class, and 1 or 2 bonus spells, automatically memorized at all time (added to ordinary memorized spells). These classes will be learned by going training in village and towns, and have quite a high cost in silver. Each 5, 6 or 7 levels (I'll decide later), you can have a new, additional class. They might have requirements in traits, stats, skills and levels. Not sure yet I'll add these though. Like... 84% chances. 8) Talking to random characters in town, other than quest givers. These will talk to you about interesting things that are happening/happened in the area. I'll avoid random babbling about their lives, because... I just don't like it in games. It's useless and take you off the track of the game story, and reduce the intensity of gameplay. It's annoying to have to go through 10 random people to get 1 info relevant to what you're actually doing... in my opinion. And it's my game, so. 9) More quests... obviously. 10) Magical objects that give special powers to characters. Often dropped by unique characters and found in special treasures. I'll try to make them interesting and unique, and make their discovery a special, rare event. Each character would have 3 slots for these items. That's about all... These are all fortunately rather easy to integrate in the game. Most of the "new" systems are very similar to what I already programmed in the game, almost copy/paste with small modifications. A challenge of adding all these in the game is balancing enemies with all the added power and all. Every time I add or change things at the start of the game, everything after it becomes too easy or too hard. Changing all of these is sure to throw everything off balance, but I'll correct it again after these changes. I hope I can make these changes quite rapidly, too, and in a single update... to avoid re-balancing all the game many times. These kind of changes are those that take the least time to make. And I think these will be the last things I'll add to the game, other than contents at the end of the game and graphical/sound/art improvements, added spells, skills, equipments and enemies... and things I already said I would add. And bug corrections, and general improvements. And keep in mind, I promise nothing. These are what I plan to make, but plans change (and mine change a lot).

Hi everyone, The next things that will most probably get in the game are things that will improve the contents, gameplay and fun in the first 14 hours of the game. All of these will be inserted to replace parts of the beginning of the game. It might mean that players already into the game would be better off restarting... but the new contents will make it worthwhile. I played the whole game like... 30 times, probably more? And I'm not even tired... ok maybe a little. :P But it's highly replayable, in my opinion. Just try a new group... 1) I will add a bit of fun and diversity to combats by placing powerful named, unique enemy characters/bosses. These will talk when entering battle, to challenge, insult or taunt the party characters, and for some of them, when they die. Later in development process, they will probably have voice added... like most of the main dialogs in the game. I aim for 6 to 8 unique characters of each main enemy groups, maybe 10 for goblins. 2 to 5 for side enemy groups. They are very fun for me to make, and quite easy too with the engine I programmed. These characters are 100% sure to give their (quite good) equipment for loot, and sometimes, with a special item, that I describe later. 2) A very special, magical item that you can buy will let you absorb magical energies that flow in special places around the game world. Every magical absorption will imbue this magical item with new powers that will improve the whole party. 3) I will redo some parts of the beginning areas to have more places of interest. I want the game world to be packed with interesting things to do and explore, and less generic combats. Maybe it will be a bit crazy and unrealistic, but it's more fun like that. Fun beats realistic. 4) More diversity in enemies. Spitting spiders, more undead types (with elites/uniques), slimes, etc. 5) Possibly 2 or 3 additional dungeons. Maybe even more. 6) Making the main quest advance much earlier in the game. Taking what was for later and making it at the start, then it continues for the whole game. 7) Character classes. But non-restrictive character classes, that only improve your power. Not sure I'll call it a "class". They will give bonus stats, skills/passive powers unique to that class, and 1 or 2 bonus spells, automatically memorized at all time (added to ordinary memorized spells). These classes will be learned by going training in village and towns, and have quite a high cost in silver. Each 5, 6 or 7 levels (I'll decide later), you can have a new, additional class. They might have requirements in traits, stats, skills and levels. Not sure yet I'll add these though. Like... 84% chances. 8) Talking to random characters in town, other than quest givers. These will talk to you about interesting things that are happening/happened in the area. I'll avoid random babbling about their lives, because... I just don't like it in games. It's useless and take you off the track of the game story, and reduce the intensity of gameplay. It's annoying to have to go through 10 random people to get 1 info relevant to what you're actually doing... in my opinion. And it's my game, so. 9) More quests... obviously. 10) Magical objects that give special powers to characters. Often dropped by unique characters and found in special treasures. I'll try to make them interesting and unique, and make their discovery a special, rare event. Each character would have 3 slots for these items. That's about all... These are all fortunately rather easy to integrate in the game. Most of the "new" systems are very similar to what I already programmed in the game, almost copy/paste with small modifications. A challenge of adding all these in the game is balancing enemies with all the added power and all. Every time I add or change things at the start of the game, everything after it becomes too easy or too hard. Changing all of these is sure to throw everything off balance, but I'll correct it again after these changes. I hope I can make these changes quite rapidly, too, and in a single update... to avoid re-balancing all the game many times. These kind of changes are those that take the least time to make. And I think these will be the last things I'll add to the game, other than contents at the end of the game and graphical/sound/art improvements, added spells, skills, equipments and enemies... and things I already said I would add. And bug corrections, and general improvements. And keep in mind, I promise nothing. These are what I plan to make, but plans change (and mine change a lot).

Just a small post to show the new face styles that come from the new update. These are all random styles (clicked on "randomize" many times and made a video of the faces it made). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NngqluwXm00

Just a small post to show the new face styles that come from the new update. These are all random styles (clicked on "randomize" many times and made a video of the faces it made). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NngqluwXm00

I want to take the habit of making public what I'm doing a lot more, it's a weakness I have to be quite private on my work, so here it goes. I'll try to do it regularly. These last days, I've improved the way the natural environments look. I've realized that for terrain ground, it's way better to have 1 huge texture (2048x2048 or 4096x4096) with a lot of variations inside it, than many textures that you mix in the game engine, for a lot of reasons... simplicity being the main one. Simplicity in everything is very important, and it's something I realise more and more. The more complex things are, the longer it takes to modify or improve them, and that can be exponential. And it just looks much better with very little effort. With that, I also want to make more variations in environments. I will make 5 (maybe more) different outdoor "styles" for the game. I use a generator I programmed to help create the maps, and each map has a style, from which the generator create environments automatically with what I give it... if that makes sense. I choose what goes where, and it generates the map with the style it was assigned. Creating good looking maps is really fast and easy with that tool, but making interesting maps can still take some time. This generator is great to create good-looking generic environments, but I still want to make each area unique. I also want to make the game more graphically cohesive. I admit that I bought models from the unity asset store, but this makes a mess of the project, with random folders all over the place and objects, textures everywhere... it's not fun to work with that. And not all the styles are working well with each other, but I only use the best of what I bought and what I produced myself and with the help of 2 graphic artists I hired. I want to do 2 things : make the graphics styles as unified as possible and make most graphics unique to my game. I'll probably keep some of the one I bought, but I'll certainly modify those that don't fit that well with the rest, that are placeholders for the moment. I'm becoming a way better graphic artist than I was, by working with graphics so much... it's something I was very bad when I began. I've studied a lot of recent games graphics to see what was good or not, and how they did it. One great example of what I like the most and would like to resemble is Magicka 2. Simple and beautiful. I know that I will not be able to do as good as that, but I can learn from it or use it as reference material. Well... that's it for now. I go back to working on the game. The main reason I didn't do these kind of "updates" is that they take time to do, and they take me off the game itself. But I guess they are useful to connect with you, the players and interested gamers, so I'll continue them.

I want to take the habit of making public what I'm doing a lot more, it's a weakness I have to be quite private on my work, so here it goes. I'll try to do it regularly. These last days, I've improved the way the natural environments look. I've realized that for terrain ground, it's way better to have 1 huge texture (2048x2048 or 4096x4096) with a lot of variations inside it, than many textures that you mix in the game engine, for a lot of reasons... simplicity being the main one. Simplicity in everything is very important, and it's something I realise more and more. The more complex things are, the longer it takes to modify or improve them, and that can be exponential. And it just looks much better with very little effort. With that, I also want to make more variations in environments. I will make 5 (maybe more) different outdoor "styles" for the game. I use a generator I programmed to help create the maps, and each map has a style, from which the generator create environments automatically with what I give it... if that makes sense. I choose what goes where, and it generates the map with the style it was assigned. Creating good looking maps is really fast and easy with that tool, but making interesting maps can still take some time. This generator is great to create good-looking generic environments, but I still want to make each area unique. I also want to make the game more graphically cohesive. I admit that I bought models from the unity asset store, but this makes a mess of the project, with random folders all over the place and objects, textures everywhere... it's not fun to work with that. And not all the styles are working well with each other, but I only use the best of what I bought and what I produced myself and with the help of 2 graphic artists I hired. I want to do 2 things : make the graphics styles as unified as possible and make most graphics unique to my game. I'll probably keep some of the one I bought, but I'll certainly modify those that don't fit that well with the rest, that are placeholders for the moment. I'm becoming a way better graphic artist than I was, by working with graphics so much... it's something I was very bad when I began. I've studied a lot of recent games graphics to see what was good or not, and how they did it. One great example of what I like the most and would like to resemble is Magicka 2. Simple and beautiful. I know that I will not be able to do as good as that, but I can learn from it or use it as reference material. Well... that's it for now. I go back to working on the game. The main reason I didn't do these kind of "updates" is that they take time to do, and they take me off the game itself. But I guess they are useful to connect with you, the players and interested gamers, so I'll continue them.

Hi everyone, This update has 2 important things improved/corrected. First, I have added a lot of customization options for party characters : you can now change eyes by combining eyes and eyebrows textures, you can combine 2 hair styles (front and back hair), and you can change eye colors. I am working on adding more options and making them look better. This is just the beginning of character customization. Also, I corrected a major bug with the tutorial, where every time you close the game you had to redo the tutorial again. If you still experience this problem, just press ctrl-alt-4 in the start menu. This update took more time than it should have, sorry about that. I need to explain why it took so much time... in fact, I'll explain why the game is advancing at a slower pace than it should. First, if you don't already know, I'm alone in this project. It is also the first game project I made using Unity, in fact... I transfered it from another engine to unity (from Mogre, for those interested). I did not program this game specifically for unity, so there is a lot of programming that is kind of.. unnecessary. But getting rid of it would be very, very long and hard, and it would riddle the game with bugs. I would have to completely redo it from the beginning. This made the program very big, heavy and complex. Changing even small things can be tedious. I would say it is well programmed, I just made it way too complex, with over-complicated systems. Also, I did not realize, at the start of the project, that making the game party based without changing from exploration to combat states (like old Final Fantasy games) but always moving each member of the party, all the time, with no difference from moving around to combat (like Dragon Age, Baldur's Gate, etc.), would be such a pain. Artificial intelligence, combat, map creation, game object creation, almost everything is way more complicated. I could only know it by doing it, I guess. So the game has like 3 times the amount of programming it would need if it was made another way. And... I recently tried to restart the project... by keeping the good code, getting rid of the excess. I wanted to try to see if it would be long. It would work great... but it would be too long indeed. I've almost finished this version, it would be stupid make another one. I'll keep these changes for the next games. That is, in part, why it took a while for the update. I want to say this : This project is extremely important to me. I will never give it up, even if it takes a while to complete. I'm not always very productive, and sometimes life gets in the way... but I will finish it, I promise. And it will not be a rushed, botched finish. I am a perfectionist, maybe to a fault... but I need to be proud of this game to call it finished. I love this game, it is a passion project... and I owe it to those that bought it to finish it. And again, to everyone who are patient with me to complete this game... Thank you.

In this update, here are the changes that have been done : - There is now a small window that will show the player what actions have been registered for the party characters. This was asked quite a few times, but I hadn't found a good and elegant way to do it... now I have. - In party creation, the player has a complete preview of the archetypes and saved characters when he passes the cursor over their buttons, it even shows their appearance, before he decides the one he wants to add to the party. - The small help window (for spell and skills descriptions) now follow the cursor. - Ranged characters no longer back off when you are close to them (this was annoying if they went too far). I want to thank BigRowdy, Markus and Kloodge for their help to find the problems in the game and their ideas on how to improve it. It is really appreciated. Dave

As I said many times before, this game is very different in gameplay and system from other games of the genre, and making a tutorial for such a different game is really hard to do. Players have their old ways of doing things that they developed playing other games and they do it by reflex in this game... but in this game, it doesn't work at all, so they think there is something wrong with the game. Last week, I finally thought of a good way to make a tutorial that would make the players lose their old ways of playing and get them into the "Worlds of Chaos" way of playing. It is a step by step tutorial that blocks most options at the beginning and unlocks it in a certain order to teach the right way of playing and help understand the system, for every part of combats (spell use, targeting, injuries, combat stats, etc.) I just finished integrating this new tutorial to the game, so it is surely not completely right yet. I think it is a bit text-heavy, but at least it explains a lot, and everything in this tutorial is useful to know. Also, next thing I work on today, is placing a text indicator of what the character is doing in his portrait window. This will let the player know that his order has been registered and make it clear what everyone is doing. It should be done by tomorrow.

I've made some updates recently and decided to publish it under one announcement. I've redone the beginning of the game and augmented the number of starting spells and skill points for characters, making them stronger and most importantly, more diversified and unique. I've created 6 new archetypes for a total of 16, and redone/improved the 10 already created. I improved the party creation interface, simplified the process of party creation and made it more clear what you need to do. I've also given the possibility to skip tutorials, which can be undone in the options. I realized the starting of the game is really important for players to get into the game and it must be very fun right from the start, with the adrenaline of not being sure to survive even the first fight. You can always resurrect with a penalty that is not too punishing. But the easy and beginner friendly (but not really interesting) start I made has now been remade to be quite challenging. The style of the game is "challenging"... so, prepare to suffer ;-)

In this small update, the interface of the bestiary has been improved, and now shows an image of the enemies. It will probably be improved further with the lists of enemies for easier navigation and to find the enemies you look for faster. The update also solves the bug where you could sometimes get quest rewards more than one time.

In this small update, I made the party creation interface clearer, easier to understand and better looking. I also solved a bunch of bugs.

I've made quite a few updates in the past months that I didn't post about. I've continued the creation of the world for a total of 14 hours of gameplay (out of about 23 I aim for the whole game), I corrected a bunch of bugs and I added new weapon types, diverse types of bows and most importantly magic staffs, each individual staff in the game having different damage type (fire, ice, magic, lightning, etc.). Also, I'm about to launch a "marketing campaign" for this game. It's quite a bit overdue, but it's something I've been very uncomfortable doing... yet it must be done if I want to succeed. I've learned how to do it in the past months and now that I'm very proud of this game, it will be a lot easier for me to do it. I don't feel like the game is lacking anymore.

In this update, the interface for character's base stats, character customisation, spells, inventory, equipments, merchants have all been redone and look a lot nicer and more user friendly. Also, when the player choose targets in combat or targets allies or enemies with spells, the game shows which character is targetted clearly. All spells now are cast immediately when ordered by the player. There was no real good reason to delay them (casting time) but to reduce their power, so I just reduced their power in other ways. The fatigue system has been removed, because I could not make it improve the game strategically like I thought. It became a minor annoyance, but an annoyance anyway. The day/night cycle has also been removed, for the moment. Nights were too dark and the ambiance was not right if it was less dark. Night was just not fun, I'll probably put it back later after I work on it. Other than that a bunch of bugs were also corrected and balance improved.

Now there are 10 hours of very intense gameplay, tested for fair balance and fun party progression. I also progress very rapidly in this world creation process, I make about 20-30 minutes of gameplay per day these days, tested and all. I have also taken a big, final decision for the game. There won't be many adventures as I wanted in the previous updates. I'll make what I wanted to do at the beginning : one big, open world adventure of about 20 hours where you explore a place filled with evil and you must discover and stop the cause of the problems, in any order you decide to do it. I also finally see the end of this project. Making the rest of this game world won't take much time, and I've taken my decisions on what I want to make or not for this current game. It's easy to want to have a huge list of features, but I've decided that it's enough. These are the things I plan on making for the rest of the game : - More options to customize characters : faces, body types, hair styles. - More spells and skills. I aim for something like 15-20 new spells, and 15 new skills. - Staff weapons for mages. - A bunch of new enemies (40 or more) for the end of the game. - New special characteristics for magical weapons and armors. - Better interfaces for character stats, inventory and spells. I'm not quite sure how I'll do these, though. There is a problem with screen space and organisation for these... but I'll find somethng. If there is a feature you'd like to see, please ask. Maybe I'll do it. And thanks to everyone for your patience. This game and these updates took quite a bit of time to make and no one ever complained about it or put pressure on me, and everyone has been awesome in the forums.

Here is a small update on what I plan on doing next, for those interested to know. From players comments, I realised that the UI had problems and that it would be a very good thing to update it to something better. So I want to redo the interface for party creation with one screen/window for each part of character creation, which will unload the window and give a much better idea of what to do to create characters. I'll make it as simple and straight forward as possible for each step. I'll also change the interface for character stats, inventory, spells and merchants. The interface will now focus on one charqacter at a time instead of the whole party, which will make it way easier to understand and work with for beginners, and will also look much better, I think. I also want to work on adding staffs and robes for mages, and other weapons and shields I didn't put in the game for the moment. Edit: I also want to give characters more appearance customization options : at least 5 different faces per sex, possibility to change character size and body shape (4 shapes for each sex, slim, average, muscular, and fat), something like 10 hair styles and more color options for hair, skin and base. And maybe some beards too. So this is it for now. It might change to something else, I promise nothing. These are just my priorities at the moment.

Please take this small 10 questions survey : https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/DSV3Z6R - The interface has been upgraded with more interactivity. - Female characters have female voices. - Some other debugging and minor improvements. - On my side I have improved the interiors editor working on a new system, the old did not make good graphics and I wasn't satisfied. The new one will make way better dungeons and interiors. If you want to see some gameplay of the 30 first minutes of the game : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeKkOskceD0

The big update is finally ready. The game will have changed quite a bit : - The graphics have drastically improved since last update. Check them out. - Day/Night cycle and weather effects. - Global map to keep track of where you've been. - A new dialog/scripting system and a cutscene system. - New spells and skills - A lot of new monsters - Female characters, plus some new character appearance options. - The game now works with independant adventures that you choose when in town. This, and completely new file system (not relying on unity to save game data anymore, too buggy and inflexible), a super easy to use adventure editor, have been very long to program and debug, but it will make a big difference for the rest of the early access process, as I will publish adventures from time to time. You might also have seen the "Corruption" removed from the title... this is because the game will not be for the Corruption campaign, but an open choice of out-of-campaign adventures, and some campaigns (series of related adventures) with it. In the end, you will have more content to play than I was supposed to do before. The game is now quite stable and almost bug-free (please tell me if you find some). I want to make a development blog from now on. I've been too secretive in this project and need to get in touch with the players a lot more.

This update has improved graphics for natural environments, added SSAO, and improved particle and sound effects for spells. Game speed has been lowered back to what it was before the last update (if you prefer faster gameplay, you can still change it in the options). Other minor changes have been made. The demo version will no longer be available. The game price was raised to 11.99$ US. I plan on making a series of videos to show the gameplay, and how the game is meant to be played. As I said before many times, this game is different from every other game in the market. Players will be lost and confused if they try to play it like other party based crpgs. This update took a while to make, and the reasons are that I tried to make some major changes that I had to cancel. I tried to create worlds manually, but the results were not very good, and took too much time. I use a map generator that I programmed to create maps, which gives much better results for way less work. Roguelike random world generation was too complex (I still want to make it, but later, other things are more important). I also took a break, this project is big and I have worked on it for a while, and I needed it.

The game has been updated with an upgrade from unity 4 to unity 5, It also has new special magic characteristics for armors, and minor bug repairs. Edit : Combat speed has also been increased, and will probably be increased even more in the future, to be equal or higher than the current arcade mode, which will probably cease to exist. I will in the near future work on new maps and new exterior styles, to avoid monotony and make exploration more interesting and fun. I will also put a lot of efforts in a more interesting scenario, with NPC interactions and deeper and more interesting quests. This is my plan but not a promise, things are always subject to change,

I've finished the update I've been working on. There are many new things in this update :

• Pause and give orders is now part of the game. Just press spacebar. Select all characters is now Tab.
• A lot of new tutorial popups to explain the game as you play.
• A bestiary to check the enemy stats.
• Small windows that show your selected character's chances to hit, damage, attack time, and critical chances against the chosen enemy, and this enemy's stats against the selected character.
• Small window that show hovered spell descriptions in combat.
• New magic objects (rings) that give stat bonus and weapons now have some special bonuses. Makes treasures and merchants way more interesting and diversified.
• Town Portal Orbs are now used to get to town merchants (instead of V key for village merchants, which has been removed).
• Lowered silver from loot quite a bit.
• Added a Fast explore mode (activated with Alt) the makes the game 2 times faster out of combat. And some minor fixes :
• You can now learn a spell and put it directly in spell slots to use it in combat.
• Repaired the bug with too fast spell recovery.
• Small changes to some maps to balance difficulty.
• Other changes and bug repairs too minor to put here, or that I forgot.
  
  [ 2016-03-18 06:36:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

Seeing that many players don't really understand the way this game is meant to be played, I have made a tutorial inside the game. As I said many times, this game is quite different from other games and needs to be explained well to be played as intended. If you have already played the game and had trouble understanding how to play, please check the game or demo again, you can continue your game and it will explain things as you play. If you play the game with the tutorial, please some leave feedback in the comments here to tell me if it is good enough, or what could be improved, or anything else.

I made a mistake. The more I think about it, and the more I see comments, the quite high number of wishlist and not very good sales, the more I think the price was wrong. The problem with pricing is, as a developer I have no experience yet in this, and I get only one chance to get it right (for me who likes to try many things to see what works). I followed bad advices and changed my mind two weeks before launch (10$-15$ was my first idea, I'm way more comfortable with a lower price). I'm changing the price to 10$. But I don't want to be unfair to early buyers who trusted me with this game... so I'll offer a compensation : 1) If you have not played more than 2 hours yet, please get a refund and buy it again after. It is not considered as abuse from steam : http://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/ "We do not consider it abuse to request a refund on a title that was purchased just before a sale and then immediately rebuying that title for the sale price." 2) If you cannot get the refund then forward to me your steam receipt at support@worldsofchaos.com, give me your account name so I check you have player more than 2 hours and I'll refund you the price difference via paypal. I'm really sorry for the inconvenience for the early buyers. It's necessary for me to correct the price, it's hurting the project quite a bit. I might raise it again in the future, but it will be gradually, as the game gets more complete.