Hello!

I recently made some strides cleaning up the game engine and polishing/developing some existing systems and I felt like sharing my progress so far. Keep reading if you’re interested about the new Skills System, Weapon tweaks, etc.

Skills

The previous skill system felt really limited, overly rigid and unclear, so I decided to unravel that whole ordeal into something more intuitive.

As of now, each unit can have up to 5 skills, from 3 categories.

1 Personal Skill – A skill that is related to the character’s personality, backstory, etc. Almost always unique to a character.

3 Class Skills – Up to one skill for every tier. Those are gained upon promotion.

1 Learned Skill – Acquired through a one use Skill Scroll.

Let’s look at an example.

Personal Skill : Quick Feet – Gwen gets an additional Move Point.

These skills sometimes come with drawbacks and benefits.

Class Skill : vs. Beasts – As a tier 1 Militia, Gwen deals +2 damage to any foes who are mounted on beasts (horse, pegasus, etc.)

She will learn more skills as she promotes.

Learned Skill : Meditation – Heals 5 HP at the start of each turn.

Using another scroll will overwrite this skill.

Weapons

Smaller inventories was a way to justify having only three different weapon types per class. Since we have bigger inventories, I decided to bring back a fourth weapon type. This change also affected some classes who now have three weapon types.

Here is the list of the affected classes and their available weapon types. The new type is in bold.

Jack of all trades : Gives those classes full control over physical/magical weaponry to be more in line with the class’ theme.

General : Sword, Axe Lance, Bows

Savant : Light, Elemental, Dark, Staves

Utility Buff : Giving Staves to two new class trees is a good way to spread the support role away from the mage classes. Rogues can now support allies when their offensive capacities aren’t up to par to the rest of the cast and Seraph Knight can use their higher mobility to support allies quickly.

Rogue : Knives, Staves

Seraph Knight : Lance, Light, Staves



Niche Fixes : These weapon types open some options for units from these classes, both for players and enemies.

Assassin : Sword, Knives, Dark

Legend : Sword, Bow, Axe

Outlaw : Axe, Knives, Bow

Grim Flier : Lance, Sword, Dark

Manticore : Sword, Lance, Axe

Wyvern Lord : Sword, Lance, Axe

Growth Items

Growth items are now fully functional in-game. Items like the Lucky Charm (+20% Luck growth) will affect growths and display them accordingly, unlocking even further potential for your units. Most of these will be rewarded as side objectives, so plan accordingly!

Style Exploration

Alongside all the development on the game systems, I snuck in some time to explore a bit about potential sprites. It’s still not exactly what I had in mind, so I’ll keep experimenting, but I wanted to share some progress to gather feedback.

Character Reveals

Here are this GDU’s reveals : Sabrina, the Bow Squire and Gwen, the Militia.

There’s already another character in the works, but I didn’t manage to get him done in time for this update since it was a more technical update than artistic. Follow BlindCoco Studios on Twitter or Wicked Night on Facebook to be the first to see!

Thanks for reading this far,

Coco