Hey all, Im now a couple of months more in developing the games endgame area. Its taking longer than average area because Im throwing all my creative budget at this one: This is *The Finale* after all. That means the endgame area is receiving an entirely new tileset, with almost nothing being copied from other tilesets, fancy animations, dozens and dozens of assets, new mechanics, and new sources of XP... I am happy to report however, that the progress done since the last update has been immense, and the exteriors of the endgame are nearly finished, Im currently working on implementing new gameplay features.
Spoiler warning: From here, the post will contain some details about the game's finale. So, the endgame area may look like a city, but its more like a dungeon with 8 different ways to traverse through it and get to the endpoint of the story. Reaching a very high or even max level in any of the 8 classes will unlock a method of traversal through a city. These can be mixed too, you may use one class to get through 2 of 4 class challenges and complete the other 2 using another class, for example. How that works is that the city is divided into 4 floors / layers / levels and each of them has 5 class challenges + 1 for the three combat classes. So you can choose a different class to progress through each of the layers. However, I believe most players wont have all classes maxed at this point game if what they did was simply progressing through the story. Level 1
Level 2
Level 3
Level 4
Class challenges vary in difficulty and complexity, so it should make for an interesting area.
Some of the challenges arent *just* one-time challenges, they are also new sources of the endgame amounts of XP, so its twice as cool! To make all of this even more worthwhile, I have added a new equipment set as a reward.
Inspired by one of my favourite characters, Homura from Puella Magi Madoka Magica, this armour set does not belong to any of the three combat classes.
Instead, it benefits purely from the curse chance, so it can be combined with a variety of equipment and weapons. To obtain the full set, players need to complete the story, otherwise, the more class challenges a player completes, the more of the pieces can taken from a secret building called the Vault. Whats an endgame if it doesnt have a secret or two? It took a very long time to animate this armour, but I am happy to express my passion for alternative fashion and hyper-femininity. After getting through this challenge, I went ahead to implement the rest of the items players will find in the city. The more notable of these items are four new elixirs that can be crafted using a new alchemical ingredient. This expands the alchemist class and it makes it a lot more valuable to a player. The events are also very powerful, from negating an additional 20% damage to turning a player into a living weapon.
Besides the dozens of new items, features, and assets, Ive also made a good number of audio, graphical, and QoL changes and fixes. My audio guy, Bert Cole, has created new music tracks and sound effects which I implemented during this period. I have improved how items behave when dropped, making loot drops more satisfying and practical. Also, made significant changes fixing several problems connected to how items were added to the inventories. I have moved the game message log to the centre bottom of the screen putting the messages closer to everything else I have made improvements to talkstone chest storage by changing where certain item times are stored, it makes more sense now. Also, once a specialized item storage is full the item will be deposited into everything goes tabs, significantly increasing the practical size of the item storage. I believe a couple of months more should be enough to have a beta version, 0.9.9, ready! We will see if the game will be released soon after beta tests or itll be receiving an additional phase of polishing. So, yeah, overall development has been going *great*! Thanks for reading and until next time!