For today’s update, we’d like to talk about PSI and how we’re moving forwad on that. Starting out, take a look at this:

Meryl and Leo are invaluable for battles like this.

We’ve improved the animation for PK fire, taking care by drawing frame by frame - rather than using multiple sub-objects that animate like in the previous PK Fire animation. It’s been like this for a little while now, but the last time it was seen was in our first trailer.

This is the approach we’re taking with all the PSI effects from now on, even for overworld effects. The one you’ll be seeing the most is probably this one that Pik made a few nights ago:

It probably won’t use all your PP unless you just can’t get enough.

Telepathy has a slightly expanded role in Mother 4, in addition to showing enemy stats in battles it can be used to learn additional things from NPCs or just hear something different from them. Since it’s so frequently used, we’re gonna implement a way to use it in a single button press. Right now it’s accessed from the menu like other PSI, though. The implementation is pretty similar to writing normal dialog.

See? It actually requires less tagging than the usual script.

What we’ve been working on lately is this sort of interface experience. Ryan’s plugging away at doing some houses, and as more PSI gets programmed into the game (we have we’ve been testing it out for speed and effects quality. Making the game feel good to play is just as important to us as making the assets high quality. Hopefully we can strike a good balance.

As far as the tone of our updates are concerned, with most of the features we feel okay with showing off early out of the way we’ll be returning to the style of updates we’d initially planned on… within some reason. Showing off too much of the game feels like ruining it, but showing off some of the stuff we’re doing at any given moment sounds like something we can get behind.

We’ll be starting in on that coming up on the last day of the month!