It’s hard to believe it’s already summer! Here’s a quick update on where we’re at with Battleheart 2.

The latest milestone is that our main menus are all complete. They may not seem that flashy or cool, but its a LOT of work to build all of the UI that you interact with between battles. It should look familiar to players of prior Battleheart games, but we’ve introduced some new systems as well. You can manage your inventory, change the party’s equipment, and buy new items with gold acquired from battles just as before. Aside from simple attack and defense stats, items can provide things like critical hit chance or life draining effects, and this menu includes a very detailed summary of all of those bonuses, so you never need wonder what your total stats are when many different sources are effecting the same thing.

In addition, we built an interface for enchanting items. Enchantment can be performed with “crystals”, another currency that can be awarded from battle. Any item can be enchanted to boost its stats, and enchantment can be performed repeatedly on the same item. However, the cost is higher for more powerful equipment, and increases exponentially with each application.

Looking beyond your heroes’ equipment, you’ll find the “talents” page. Like the original Battleheart, each hero can wield up to 3 activated abilities and several passive bonuses, but the way you acquire them is slightly different. In the original Battleheart, new skills were simply unlocked every 5 character levels, and you would occasionally get a choice between 2 competing options. In Battleheart 2, you’ll instead acquire “skill points”, another currency shared by the party that’s used to unlock active and passive abilities for your team. Rather than the occasional choice between 2 things, you’re free to select among a whopping 20 passive talents for each hero. You can spend your skill points heavily on one or two heroes, or distribute them more evenly, the choice is yours. And fear not, your choices aren’t permanent – it’s possible to refund a talent purchase and distribute your skill points elsewhere if you make a mistake. Like enchanting, skill point costs increase rapidly the more you invest them into the same hero.

Between skill points, crystals and items, there’s a lot of ways to differentiate your heroes. However, we decided to reduce distinction in one area – experience. Your heroes don’t gain XP individually anymore, but instead share XP and level as a single unit. This makes it relatively easy to switch your party members and experiment with different compositions, even if you’ve been playing with the same group for many hours it’s not a huge chore to “catch up” a hero you’ve neglected if you want to take them for a spin.

So… what’s left? More heroes and bad guys! The next task on the agenda is the remaining 4 heroes I’ve committed to for launch – a Samurai, Necromancer, Frost Mage, and Battle Priest. After that, lots of enemies, playtesting and tuning. I’m 100% confident that by winter, we’ll have the game mostly complete, perhaps with the exception of the boss battles. I don’t want to rush those, so if anything pushes us out of 2017 it’ll be those. We’ll have an update later this year for sure as we approach the finish line.