That’s right. Our (unofficial) founding was early in 2016 and I’ll be damned if I’m going to write our birthday piece in January.
I intend to spend most of January hungover, and I don’t even drink. Anyway, I asked the various studio members to say something about our 10 year history. I’m not even gonna proofread them!
(This is a lie I fixed a few spelling mistakes)
Very Brief Dev Update
Psyche! First it’s a dev update. We are VERY close to being ready for testing. I have some more NPCs and examinables to add, I have to put in code to basically cut the kitsune finale (sorry, we’re just not going to have the sprites ready in time. You can do the rest of the questline.) and then I need to add TREASURE to the maps so you can find all kinds of goodies. Then I’ll send a build to the testers and take a day off.
PSYCHE AGAIN I won’t take a day off I’ll be fixing bugs for weeks. Combat is coming along pretty well, I will have to trim a lot of enemy groups and there’s always more balancing to do.
Plus we will have a very special prototype coming up – soon! I don’t know when it will be ready! And when the Ch2 update comes out, I have another prototype to make before we start WoR! AHHHHHHHH
I have about 80% of the portrait/NPC entries. If you’re one of the top three tier backers for the WoR kickstarter, check your messages! I will chase you down *individually* if I have to.
Development!
All the major and minor quests are now complete. The last one was a needlessly complex scene in the Poterup baths. Why did I make it so complex?! It reacts to your actions, why do I do this!? Anyway, from here on out, it’s combat balance, item placement, NPCs, and examinations. There’s still a lot of work to do to make the world of Chapter 2 come to life and be interesting to explore.
All of the developers are chipping in to make this happen.
Big 10 Year Post Next Week
That’s right, next year in January is our studio’s 10th anniversary. Because everyone will be too wasted off eggnog to do a big post in January, we’re doing it next week. Get psyched for that! You’ll hear from the entire team, not just me, Salty! I have so many regrets! I fuck up often!
You’ll probably see at least one picture of Niko, too.
Witches of Ravenbrook: Forms sent to certain backers
I have sent messages to all backers in the top three tiers of WoR who are going to have custom characters in the game, either as portraits, NPCs, or Enemies. Inky wants to get started on those this month. If you didn’t get the form but think you should have, you can email us at pandemonium[at]starlightstudios.org with questions.
Tales of Strings: Strings Are Attached is now out!
After a battle with squirrel hybrids, Dorothy chews out her teammates for their sloppy form. She’s under a lot of stress, and the new yoga place that opened in a mini-mall seems promising. Dorothy soon finds her mood improving, not to mention she gets to sleep at a reasonable hour. She even finds herself wanting to hang out with Jamie and the others. The only problem is that she can’t really seem to remember what happened at the last yoga session, and finds herself becoming less herself, and more like someone pretending to be herself.
The tenth Tales of Strings is now out, and we’re going back to our roots with Doll Transformation here, everyone. Xandra went totally wild on this one, don’t miss the bonus art package!
As usual, if you’ve been a patron for the previous month of November of or more than 5 dollars, send a DM over Patreon for a free copy. Next time: Butterflies!
Game Development
While I’m not going to unify the map and warp code yet, it’s really gnawing at me. Otherwise, all the spa puzzles are done, the map work is done (for now) and I sent a set of revisions to Stinkehund. All the portraits are done (thanks, Koops) and Koops/Hund want to help with the sprites. The art assets should all be done soon. My target is a Patron Release at the end of the year, though I may push it back to let the testers have more time with it as there is a LOT to test. If that does happen, it’ll be worth it to have a smoother launch.
This week we’re doing a cross-promotion with Crimson Veil, which just had version 5.7.1 go public! You can get it over on this bsky post which will lead you to the Itch/Steam downloads.
Look, you like RoP, you like other bottled Starlight work. You’ll like Crimson Veil if you’ve never played it. Trust me on that one. And it’s free, what have you got to lose? Are you afraid you might have too much fun?
Coding, Development
We now have all the maps, all the backgrounds, and all the talk sprites for the chapter done. There’s a few more Nice-To-Haves, and I need to kick Urimas’ ass so he makes more sprites for me, but now it’s down to coding.
Raelynn’s Relaxation Resort, a spa you can find on the northeast edge of the Old Capitol Grounds. Raelynn has some problems, you see, there was a footrace the other day and she needs to know who won and what colour they were wearing. Help her out it’s not a puzzle and she’ll reward you!
I honestly thought the code for these not puzzles would take a lot longer than it did, they came out very clean and bug-free. There’s no combat, it’s just some light helping out and you get some nice items for it. You can even relax in the hotsprings yourself!
This week I need to implement all the new map code (there are THREE full page maps in the next update! Three! All of Northwoods was ONE!), test it, and then get to work on the Rising Dawn miniquest. Unfortunately it isn’t as fleshed out as the Raelynn quest, but maybe I can work a puzzle helping out a friend in.
In addition, all of the huntables are in and have sprites and puzzles hunting methods to find them. I will be very interested if people want me to backport hunting puzzles to Northwoods and Westwoods, it’s definitely more interesting but it might be a bit too much for a first time player who just needs gear upgrades.
Insatiable Questions
For a full-power totally invisible cat of the night, please see Dmitri.
Fan Art Fusillade (I made this joke before I think)
Our Patreon and Subscribestar are great places to support development! You can also get cool bonus stuff like concept art and early releases of Pandemonium!
But first a quick development update. The Miso Upgrade quests are mostly done, I just need to actually make it so you can find the chalcopyrite (it’s very important you see). After that I place loot in all the rooms and the combat is ready for testing. Eeeee.
Witches of Ravenbrook: Events and World Persistence
To get a few things straight, the prototype made extensive use of random level generation. This is because I had nowhere near enough time to get the 3D levels ready before we had to release the prototype, and no time to develop the levels to go with it.
The final game will use persistent 3D levels you can wander around in. These can be seen in the WoR trailer on the Kickstarter. The hub area won’t be the gardens, it will be part of the university. You’ll need to walk down Ravenbrook U’s halls to reach the pactrealms and will be able to make shortcuts to different areas that lead back to the university.
You will still be able to enter randomly generated dungeons in order to challenge yourself, get more equipment and experience, and maybe complete missions for NPCs. I’d like to add special challenges, like a random dungeon where all your characters are locked to level 1, or one where you can’t use magic. Fun extras. The majority of the game will be in handcrafted levels.
The events system is getting an overhaul. Since you will have as many as six characters in your party at once, and each of them will be able to multiclass into three classes, it starts to become the case fairly quickly that you can get all the traits for events. As such, classes will no longer have traits. Instead you will be able to buy traits that affect the entire party with Mastery Points (more on that later). This means that you won’t have to sit on a class you might not like to get the Gardener trait, you’ll need to instead use another system to get an edge in events and trade against other skills or stat bonuses.
Threat
In Witch Hunter Izana and Runes of Pandemonium, each enemy has a “threat” value that indicates which party member they hate the most. Threat is gained by using taunts and by damaging the enemy, and lost by getting hit. This system is fairly simple (whoever is doing damage is going to take damage) but is fairly opaque. In Runes you need to check the combat inspector to see the threat values. In Witch Hunter Izana, it’s Caelyn because of Bulwark :3
Instead, Ravenbrook will have threat handled positionally. Whenever the leftmost character in your party deals damage, the threat meter moves to the left. Enemies will be more likely to target the leftmost character as the meter moves left, and less likely to target the rightmost. If the meter goes all the way to the left, enemies will ignore the other party members entirely and hit the leftmost one.
(Note: All visual aids provided by artist Coco)
This is indicated by an onscreen UI device, and opens up some tactics. You can put a weak character on the other side of the party from a high-threat character, confident the enemy will ignore them. Heals, buffs, and debuffs don’t cause the threat needle to move!
In addition, once per turn you can switch a character from the front row to the back row. The back row characters will regenerate some HP each turn and cannot be attacked by the enemy, nor can they act. This means that if one of your characters is under the threat needle, you could switch them with a back-row tank character and move them around.
Boss enemies, of course, might screw with the threat needle. Expect to see a lot of that in the Witch of Deceit’s realm!
Note: All visual assets are obviously not finalized. In the above case, the purple indicator means Lore is the likely threat target, with about a 10% chance for Chris to be attacked.
Changes to Accuracy and Mastery, and Equipment
In the prototype, each character has a ton of equipment slots. It’s already a lot of management to keep track of three characters. Now in the final game there’s six! As such, we’ve cut down the total number of equipment slots. Weapon, Armour, Ammo, Accessory, and Pact (no stats, changes appearance). That’s four real slots (Pact is entirely cosmetic) so it’s 24 equipment items total, this might move to five slots depending on testing. I like to keep the game moving forward and want to avoid the player having to spend too much time messing around in their inventory. There’s already a lot of stuff to do in the UI, it’s an RPG, but cutting that down to streamline is just a good idea.
I also want to keep things as an equip-anything case. To do that in the prototype, you could equip any weapon you wanted, but if your character didn’t have proficiency in that weapon, you had a 50% miss rate. Given that you will want to change classes often, that’s going to be a problem.
Instead, all base accuracy rates are now 90% (missing in RPGs is annoying, and if both you and the enemy miss, it’s a wasted turn. 90% is enough that battle keeps moving but gives some nice “oh thank goodness” moments when an enemy misses). Instead, a class can be Proficient in a weapon type. If they are, you get +5% accuracy and +10% damage when using that weapon. Proficiencies *stack*, that is, if you multiclass with 3 classes that are all proficient with a weapon, you get +15% accuracy and +30% damage with that weapon. This is much easier to read, you will see a plus sign next to a weapon when equipping it if a character is proficient in it, and can see up to five plus signs.
How do you get more proficiencies? Mastery Points! More on that in the next section (sorry). You can also get proficiencies from armours or accessories and whatnot. Having accuracy over 100% increases your critical strike rate (base is 5%) so more accuracy means more damage, similar to how RoP and WHI handled it.
As an aside, the seven weapon categories are the same. Sword (slash), Hammer (strike), Spear (Pierce), Staff (Strike), Wand (Fire/Ice/Shock depending on the wand), Bow (Damage type uses the arrow), and Whip (Pure, ignores enemy defense). However, proficiency in Staff and Wand instead increases damage dealt by magic spells by 10% per proficiency when those weapons are equipped. Staff typically has some defensive bonuses on it, while Wand is pure damage. Wizard characters will want to use Staves and Wands but can totally use the other weapons, and you can multiclass to get good at using them too!
Armours also have proficiency ratings, though only body armour. Accessories and any other defense equipment we may add do *not* have proficiencies. Armour is divided into Light, Medium, and Heavy, based on how much defense it gives (heavy armour also gives initiative penalties). If a character is proficient in an armour type, they take 7% less damage *after attack/defense is computed* per point of proficiency. This applies to both physical and magical damage (but not pure damage). If this sounds complex, it just means you should wear armour your characters are proficient in, and they will take less damage than if you wore all Heavy armour all the time. You can still do that if you want!
The auto-equip algorithm will take proficiencies into account when picking the best gear out. This is done by using the equipment’s “score” (an internal quality value based on its stats) and adding percentage bonuses if a character is proficient with it. Hopefully this is all easy to understand on the UI, just equip the best stuff with lots of green plus signs.
Mastery Points
Now for the big one. In the prototype, each class gained JP when you defeated enemies, and could level up. This unlocked new skills and boosted the stat increases the class gave. If a class is fully leveled, it even gave a permanent bonus. Some were nice-to-haves like a permanent +5% max HP. Some had utility, like being able to cast certain spells for free and thus meaning you could save MP for other spells. Handy!
Note: The UI for this (and a lot of other stuff) is likely getting overhauled. I want to make it more clear what each class gets for levelups, and I want to make a Spell/Skill glossary that you can use. You’ll be able to click a spell and see what it does before you even level up!
We’re keeping the JP/Class levelup system. The permanent bonuses are also staying, but will generally be moved to stat percentage bonuses. Instead, each time you gain a level in a class, you get a mastery point. There are several types of mastery points, like Cunning, Power, Wisdom, Charm, Speed, and more. Some later classes require more JP to level up and might give more than one point for each level up.
Once you have some mastery points, you can head to the mastery grid to start buying bonuses. The mastery grid opens up as the game goes on, you will find new parts of the grid as you explore, do missions, and maybe find secret areas. You can also be rewarded with mastery points for doing missions, or find them in secrets, so be nice to those NPCs and search carefully!
Mastery grid upgrades can be things like unlocking a character-specific special move, making a spell cost less MP (or even 0!), making your character resistant to certain status effects, giving resistance to damage types, stat bonuses, equipment proficiencies, and if you read the Event section above, this is where you buy traits to bypass events or get bonuses. Is it worth spending 3 mastery points so that all the dolls you meet in random events will think you’re a maid and restore some HP instead of attacking you? Hell if I know, it’s up to you!
Oh and if you screw up, or want to change your build, just ask Fluffs. She’ll hit you with her Remaster Device (it’s a frying pan) and allow you refund your mastery points.
Consumables and Grid-Based Inventory
The prototype had big list-based inventories, which is functional but still a little annoying to read. We’ll be switching to a grid-based inventory. Each party member has an inventory of five slots on their belt, and your party has a larger inventory for storing everything else.
In the prototype, all consumables like potions and firecrackers were instant-use. You could chug 20 potions in a single turn if you really wanted to! This was obviously very powerful, but expensive, so you could throw money at a problem if you were struggling with a boss or wanted to sequence break.
In the final version, each character can only use the items in their local inventory on their belt, but still can use them instantly. It might also be possible to increase the belt slots (with Mastery points or whatnot) so you can make one hell of an alpha strike by hitting the enemy with 50 magic bottle rockets on the first turn. You can get creative with it!
We’re still keeping the “you lose stuff if you die in the dungeon” thing, subject to difficulty levels. However, even on Hard difficulty, you still keep anything equipped, including carried on your belt slots. You can cram some equipment on those belt slots, so you can use that to avoid losing an item you really want to keep. In exchange, you might have fewer slots for potions and cakes!
Item Modifications
In the prototype, you could frequently find mods for your items. This actually borrows the gems system from RoP and WHI, it’s the same basic code but modified a bit in the UI. The idea was that you could disassemble an item to destroy the item but keep a mod of your choice. I wanted mods to be something you find a lot of but aren’t worried about throwing away. However, most players just put one mod in each piece of gear and then disassembled that weapon or armour to transfer the mod to the new item they just found.
That wasn’t quite what I was going for, so the mod system clearly needs adjustments. In WHI, the gem system is meant to give you a useful upgrade that you can keep as you find new gear, in fact the game even automatically transfers gems to the new equipment when you change gear.
As such, here’s the new mod system. First, disassembling an item in the field will now return all mods in the item, but destroy it in the process. You can do this *in the field* at any time. However, there is an NPC you can find early on who gives you a lot of helpful combat advice. This NPC can, for a small fee (25% of the value of the item in question), remove all of the mods from an item and not destroy it. You can sell the item (for 50% of its value) to Fluffs, or if you wanted to change the mods in it, you can then re-socket it. Also, this means unique items you can’t sell can now be re-socketed for cheap.
So, now that the player won’t be losing as many mods, what do we do? Well, that same NPC (who looks very cool by the way) offers an upgrade service. You will find a lot of +1 Attack mods in the dungeon. Take 3 +1 Attack mods and you can upgrade them into a +2 Attack mod. Oh, and if you have 3 +2 Attack mods, you can merge them into a +3 Attack mod.
Obviously this is going to become quite powerful, the cap is +25 Attack on a single mod, but keep in mind each piece of equipment has 6 mod slots! Making a +25 Attack mod from +1 Attack mods is 3^25 = 847288609443 +1 Attack mods. Obviously, you don’t have to gather +1’s, later in the game you will find more powerful mods from later enemies. Still, this means finding a chest with a bunch of mods in it is always useful, you can merge them and get some better gear as you go and, since the gear with the mods is equipped, you will never risk losing it if you die.
Mods also won’t just be stat boosts, some will be -10% cost on Fireball. Merging 3 of the -10%’s will make a -20% cost on Fireball mod, so you can get free spell casts that way!
Basically, I want to give players who engage with the system a ton of variety. There’s lots of ways to break the game and beat up enemies who are 20 levels above you and thus allow some sequence breaking. Have fun!
Sequence Breaking (or Not)
Progress is gated in three ways in Witches of Ravenbrook. The first is Miniboss Checks. If you played Witch Hunter Izana, you’re familiar with these. They are simply enemy groups that you cannot bypass, but always have the same composition. Once the group is defeated, they move out of the way and you can fight them again if you want more loot/exp. These are meant to stat-check your party. You will, however, get a preview of the enemy before you fight them in Ravenbrook, because dying matters a lot in WoR. In WHI it just booted you back to town with no loss.
The second way to gate you is – gates! You will find gates that require a key to open. Pretty self-explanatory, it’s a locked door and you need a key. You could also buy lockpicking from the mastery grid, though you will need higher lockpicking skills to open higher-level doors. Most of the time, you will need to go find a key to open the door.
However, once you encounter a door, Fluffs will now have the key for that door available for sale. *It won’t be cheap* (if you thought it would be, hi, have you met Fluffs?) so if you want to sequence break, you can! By grinding, or maybe you found a way to make a lot of money quickly.
The final way progress is gated is by exploration abilities. You will pretty quickly run into gaps you can’t walk over. Maybe you need to make a bridge somewhere, maybe you have to go around – or maybe you need to find the Long Jump magic that lets you jump further so you can clear the gap. There are several useful abilities like this, some of them given by your characters! Lore – Wall Break (can smash down certain walls to make a hole) Clover – Dispel Camera (dispels illusionary walls so you can walk through them) Penny – Midnight Oil (lights up dark areas by throwing flares)
With so much sequence breaking going on, how does the game handle all of this?
By me not getting any sleep.
But seriously, the game instead takes your party leader as the representative, and they will only sparingly speak with the other party members when talking to NPCs. Though, in some cases, only a certain character can speak with an NPC and get anything done. If this happens, the game will prompt you with “Perhaps I should let Alia handle this” so you know you aren’t missing out.
When a witch is killed, and at certain story points, your party will all talk to each other. When this happens you will instantly have all party members returned to you for free so the scene can work. You also won’t be able to confront/join any of the witches without having recruited all six characters. I don’t want to write 50 cases here, people 😉
More Next Time
December’s update post will likely be more art. January, no idea, it’s always hard to get stuff done in December because everyone is on vacation. Stay tuned!
I got like no sleep for four days (don’t ask) so I’m behind, as usual. I’ve moved the update back to next week, I don’t even have the combat test in place yet. WoR design post next week!
Coding and Stuff
I am setting up the patrols code. I also fixed a few WHI bugs and released version 1.37. I am very close to having a combat test for the testers to work on, then I can get back to finishing out the last few quests and piles of NPCs. The artists are finishing up some remaining art and I need to yell at Urimas to get me my damn sprites.
YOUR QUERIES
What’s the context on those? You figure it out. CLANG.
This is a bugfix update that fixes that pesky memory leak that only occurred when using mods. It took me five hours to track down yesterday but we finally got it! It should be rolling out to all platforms soon. This will also nominally affect RoP and WoR but since those don’t technically support mods (they do but you need to punch it in yourself) I don’t need a new RoP release.
Witches of Ravenbrook Design Update Next Week
I’ve been planning this one for a while, it’s a big design discussion on my plans for the game. It’s going to take a lot of prep work too so look forward to that. It will go into enemy threat, character progression, the persistent world, event handling, and more!
Big Halloween Update if you missed it!
If you didn’t see it, there was a big Halloween update last week on (what else) Halloween. It has a new story, mod releases, and the previous WHI update!
Other Development Update
Now that the WHI stuff is done, it’s back to work on the RoP update. Unfortunately, I spoke to Chicken and Cavecrawler Sanya will not be in the next update. It will have to be patched in afterwards. Sorry, we just won’t have time. You’re still getting three new forms, a huge new area to explore, quests, enemies, and all kinds of great stuff.
I know it’s not the same without being a cavecrawler.
Otherwise, the map is done and Hund is working on the bridge background. Koops only needs one talk sprite sheet. Art is 90% complete, and once the combat is done I have a few quests to go. After that, I want to test this one a bit more extensively. The goal is to release to patrons by the end of the year.
The final day of Midvale’s Harvest Festival is in full swing, and that means tonight is Halloween! The Knights of Justice are volunteering to help the festival, and after work, decide to indulge in some Pumpkin Eggnog that Igor found.
However, Dorothy senses a strange aura in the fields, and goes to investigate. They say the boundaries between the mundane and the magical are thin on Halloween night. The Knights of Justice are about to find out just how true that is. Can they keep their souls until the sun rises?
You can get it on Itch.io or Wechange.me! As usual, if you’re a patron of 10$ or more over the last 3 months, DM us on Patreon to get a free copy!
If this sells 50 copies then Xandra will draw a Scarecrow Igna for everyone to enjoy.
Witches of Ravenbrook Wallpaper Sent to Backers!
Inky really went all out on this one, so check your KS inbox if you’re of the tier that gets the wallpapers. It’s amazing, and shows off some stuff that isn’t quite public yet. Enjoy!
WHI v1.35 Released, PaletteForms updated, AltPuppets3 Released
PaletteForms has been updated with another new form, as well as updated images for the Toy TF! I also overhauled how the new enemies spawn, there are dedicated areas for the new Nanites, as well as a new area for the gummies, emberwisps, and the kitsunes. New low-level areas for the shadow/nanite/silver/kitsune enemies were also placed in Bowmill Forest so you can get their essences early in the game.
Yep, from all the cats of varying degrees of black here at Bottled Starlight, we wish you happy Black Cat Day.
PaletteForms Mod Update is Soon!
There’s a major update for PaletteForms coming! In addition to redone graphics for the Toy TF, we get a new TF called the Nanite Girl form. I have also redone where the new enemies appear. You can now find small dedicated areas with the enemies in them, all at very low levels. You will be able to find level 3 Nanite Girls right across from the entrance to Heronstadt, for example, so you can get the charms relatively early in the game. The Nanites also appear in the alchemy lab, and some have late-game appearances.
This mod release requires me to update the base game, which will happen this week. In addition to some bugfixes, there was an error in the AIs which we have to sort out. I will do a post when everything is ready.
The Next Tales of Strings Releases on Halloween!
We bashed out a Halloween special story because when I mentioned scarecrow TF to Xandra, she went insane. It’s fun, it has sex, TF, and jokes! See you on Halloween!
Took a little break to work on the PaletteForms update. This is good, I was going bug-eyed on the RoP update. That should be done soon, at which point I will return to working on the combat. The ability icons are in progress, I have a few quests to go, and then – no idea! Hopefully we’re ready to begin testing in November. I’m tired!
As of today, Witch Hunter Izana is on sale on Steam and Itch.io for the rest of the month. String Tyrant is on sale on Itch.io right now, and will be on sale on Steam at the end of the month as part of Steam Scream Fest.
And the spooky book sale is still on if you haven’t looked at it yet. We typically only put things on sale in October (can’t imagine why) so get it while you can!
Development!
I have finished the 28 new class abilities for the 3 new forms, fixed the pile of bugs that the testers found and some more bugs behind it, and am working on placing enemy groupings. That should be done this week and by god maybe this mess will be somewhat playable. I still have a lot of NPC dialogue to put in, and Hund just finished the maps, and there’s all these sprites, and…
Still a lot of work to go but we are DETERMINED.
I know I said there’d be the next PaletteForms update but I ran out of time. I really need to get this next build up for the testers before I work on that :3
Pandemonium Development 