Hello everyone! Merry Christmas, or Merry Dies Natalis of Sol Invictus for you traditionalists, it's time to announce the latest new feature added just in time for the holidays! This time I've added a new feature that will help StoryMode feel more like a traditional RPG and make the game a bit easier, if you become good at utilizing the strategy that is.

Introducing the Party System!

Expanding upon trading with enemies, now if you trade with an enemy successfully they'll join your party. You can have up to 4 allies in addition to your main character. By going into the assist menu, you can select which character to wander around as. Your party will consist of only the 4 strongest foes that you've befriended. All characters have a shared inventory and shared equipment, but they all have their own stats and can become afflicted with their own set of ailments. Additionally, every enemy now has their own birthsign and job assigned to them, so when they join your party and switch to a different character you now have the opportunity to play the game differently. When you sacrifice items you'll only heal your currently controlled character. The sacrifice requirement is also shared, so if you require a lot of healing, it might actually become more advantageous to just befriend more enemies because that will mean more total hp. Additionally, since the cost is shared, you might hit a point where it's cheaper to befriend enemies instead of sacrificing, so you need to consider that too. When a character dies, you'll automatically be prompted to change to another living character. Your main character may never be removed from the party. Additionally, you can not revive your main character after he/she goes down, but you can still befriend other monsters with whoever you are guiding. You can think of it as if your squad is going through the dungeon dragging around and puppeteering your main character a la Weekend at Bernie's.

Other fixes

Weather systems can now be toggled in the settings pane as they were primarily for eye-candy. There's also some general code optimizations and cleanup as always, primarily done for my own benefit. The party system was the primary update and was thrown together within the past 2 days. There's still plenty of room for improvements and rebalancing of it, which will be done according to user feedback and my own ideas. I'm going to be trying to implement the party support system within boss fights as well at a later date. Thanks again for the feedback, bug reports, and supporting development with your purchase. Be sure to tell your friends, too, if you like the game. Enjoy the new features and enjoy the Steam Winter Sale!