The translation work for WHI is now “done”. I say “done” in quotes because I currently have Pyxxis testing it to make sure it didn’t break anything important, like a cutscene. I also probably missed some lines or something didn’t get translated, because there’s just under 10,000 strings to be translated so missing a few was a near certainty.
If everything goes well, I will be posting an update to WHI later this week, as well as instructions on how to get the translation and how to make your very own if you are so inclined. This is all community-driven, I set up the spreadsheets to provide machine-translations and allow the community to improve them. You just need to replace a few files on the hard drive.
You could also theoretically make English-to-English translations and rewrite the plot of the game, I’m not saying you should do that but you can.
As mentioned elsewhere, this will eventually migrate into a RoP translation. The basic code is exactly the same, and it actually works fairly well as it is, but it’s a lot of work on my end and it also makes my eyes bleed because I’ve been doing it for three weeks. I am actually looking forward to getting back to fixing the remaining bugs. Fixing bugs is quaint, cozy, non-threatening. I am safe there, safe from the spreadsheets.
Oh, Koops finished a bunch of enemy designs and a nice pinup, and is working on a costume for chapter 5. Urimas finished the chapter 1 sprites and is making some tilesets. Giga is working on a SECRET SEQUENCE in chapter 1 that I am really excited about.
Five Fans at Arties? Five Arts at Fannies? FANAF this sucks.
I haven’t seen the movie yet but I want to so DON’T SPOIL IT. I can only assume now it involves Christine and Night using a screwdriver to disassemble a set of evil animatronic robots. That, or Golem Christine spending a series of completely uneventful nights watching harmless robots wander around since their simple frames can’t damage her chassis.
And here we have some mermaids! I can’t say what the mermaid design is going to be because that’s Mario’s territory but I like the side-fins. These pieces were created by Mugenbine by the way.
And here we have a kisekae piece by Painted Necroz of Christine getting werewolfed! Or maybe were-dogged because those floppy ears demand a scratch.
Thanks to Justin Kinniger for commissioning these pieces!
Curious Cat is CURIOUS BACK
I think I made that exact joke last time Curious Cat went down. Maybe. Time is a flat circle.
Witch Hunter Izana’s translation code is almost in place. Combat is still untranslated, and there are a few buggy lines here and there that require investigation. I will definitely be done by next week (most likely in a few days) at which point I will be forcing the testers to play the game in a language they don’t understand to make sure nothing breaks. Bwahaha.
The code for the translations is universal and isn’t just for Japanese, any language could be used. In fact, you could make a translation to English and just change the dialogue to rewrite the story if you really wanted. Most of the translation code also applies to RoP but the UI would need to be readjusted since WHI uses its own UI in C++. RoP will get a translation baseline “at some point” but I really don’t want to debug anymore stray \n’s at this point oh it hurts.
Oh and Koops finished a chapter 5 pinup, Hund is working on some scenery, and Urimas finished the last set of sprites I need for the chapter 1 update.
Concepts! Queen Viras the Storm-Eyed!
Queen Viras the Storm-Eyed, conquerer of the northern kingdoms and, more recently, speaker for life of the Jeffespeir assembly. She believes she is the heir to the long collapsed Arulente empire, ruled by a powerful dragon, and has set about conquering the lands that belonged to that empire. She is also seeking a dragon to transform her so she can make good her claim.
She’s been making good time, too. She started her campaigns at 16 and already has the northern half of the continent under her thumb. Of course, capturing the former empire’s home province of Trafal has long been the real prize, but the heavy forests of Trannadar pose a serious problem for her cavalry-dominated forces.
Despite her prominence in the lore of RoP, we actually likely won’t meet Viras for some time. Her army is present in chapter 3 but she’s busy conquering the eastern provinces of Soswitch and then Quantir. Will she be an ally of our heroes, an enemy who will sell them out, or someone who couldn’t care less what a bunch of so-called heroes are doing?
Once again, giant thanks to BlueLily for making these awesome character and costume concepts for chapter 3. Now all I have to do is finish making chapter 2 so we can actually use them!
Bonus Concept!
There are some, shall we say, “Left over” ideas. Rubber pony suits, transformations, alternate colors schemes, that sort of thing. Maybe I’ll post some of them. Like these two unnamed nobles who got gooped. I make no promises on this being canon but this is a TF game so it’d be a shame to just leave a good idea on the table right?
Curious Cat
Continues to be broken. I may have to switch to a different service. Lovely.
That’s right, at the request of some Japanese fans I have started putting together a built-in translation handler for the Starlight engine. This is run using some text identifying routines and a bit of spreadsheeting.
The principle is simple: Extract the text, put it in a spreadsheet, and then use google translate to get a machine translation. The community can then input an improved translation, and the translation is applied at runtime using some simple (and fast) binary search algorithms.
It actually should (hopefully) not take too long to finish this, though it’s tedious work. The UI needs to have various strings turned into variables and then checked against a translation. Then I’m going to force Pyxxis to bugtest the game to make sure the translations all worked. After that, the spreadsheet will be made public so you can make a copy and translate the game to whatever language you want!
Chapter 1/2/5 will *eventually* get a translation handler as well, but as those are subject to editing and addition I won’t be making a priority of it. WHI is basically done (except for a possible future DLC) so I feel good about making a translation.
More Concept Art!
Queen Viras the Storm-Eyed has exemplary light and heavy cavalry units, who can dismount and fight on foot, but the desert peoples have always been lacking experienced light skirmisher infantry. She’s hired several mercenary companies from Yeto, and here they are.
The religions predominant in Yeto worship animal spirits, and it is believed that donning the regalia of an animal spirit lends you their power in battle. That, and some of them are probably actually werecats or werejackals and hiding it in places where partirhumans are not tolerated.
Will we run into any of these in chapter 2? I hope so but I can’t promise anything. Big thanks to BlueLily again for the lovely concept art. Next week is the final chapter 3 concept: Queen Viras herself!
Curious Cat
Is broken! Something is wrong with the API. No questions will be answered until that is fixed.
That’s right, it’s Thanksgiving. “Wait, isn’t that in November”, you ask? No, that’s Yanksgiving, celebrated by Yankees. As such I’m out of town, so production is a bit slower than usual.
Big improvements this week were for mods, allowing independent save tracking and making mods able to load their own title screen images without duplication in the engine directory. I also fixed some of the bugs in the modkit and will be finishing that up soon.
At the request of a Japanese user, I am investigating building in localization helpers to the engine. This may take a while to do, as even a small game like Witch Hunter Izana has over 300 files that need localization, but I think with a bit of automation it can be done.
I wasn’t kidding about that turkey update. Look at him, in jail where he belongs.
Concept Art
I mentioned that the city of Jeffespeir had been conquered, and House Ordinaci was wiped out. This is who did it, the armies of Queen Viras the Storm-Eyed, with her personally leading the cavalry divisions. Viras sees herself as the heir to the long-dead Arulente empire, and is searching for a dragon to transform her and make good her birthright.
These guys are the only military force in the city, posted up on the streetcorners to maintain order. Despite their major presence they don’t factor too much into the plot of chapter 3, they’re just here to make sure the city pays its tribute. As long as that happens, they don’t care what Jeanne and her friends do.
Next week we get to see the Yeto mercenaries fighting alongside this army. Their designs are so cool.
Fan Art
DB Palette made another set for Witch Hunter Izana, this time it’s kitsunes and I’m losing my mind at those fits. Cyrano looks like she was born to be a fox but Izana having extra bells on her hair is the real cute strength, to say nothing of the innovative mask idea.
Curious Cat
I’m starting to think that real cats aren’t even this curious.
We had our monthly team meeting today, and things are going shockingly well. I need 2 or 3 more sprite sheets and I will have all the art I need for chapter 1’s update. As such we discussed plans for the chapter 5 update. I was thinking we’d finish 55’s Sundress costume and possibly give SX-399 a costume since she needs some love, on top of getting the new TF for Christine of course.
I have fixed most of the remaining chapter 1 bugs and also added some new stuff (it’s now possible to “complete” the rubber questline by getting a sample for Polaris) and am going to now update the modkit. I’m adding some useful backend stuff like tracking which mods are active in savefiles to prevent loading conflicts, and if I’m really feeling gutsy, I might even do mod load priorities.
More Chapter 3 Concepting!
As a continuation of the chapter 3 concepts I asked BlueLily to make, here we have the current head of House Red, Canella de Cuorelli. Driven, ruthless, and a massive bully, Canella got where she is by always being willing to stoop lower and be more brutal than everyone else. Her House supports her because she kills people who are a problem, and humiliates anyone who might be a problem.
But what’s with the rubber fox suit? Okay there’s a lot of possibilities for how chapter 3 unfolds but BlueLily really likes the quest ideas where the party turns people into various monsters in order to get rid of them and who doesn’t love rubber fox outfits?
And here’s the not-rubbered Angeline de Insiati, current head of House Yellow. The youngest official head in the House’s centuries-long history, Angeline is part of a new wave of inventor politicians. In fact, she bit off more than she can chew, and hates having to sit in parliament because it keeps her out of the workshop!
Do not underestimate her. She may be young, but she sees the world clearly and will protect her House and its members from the machinations of the other Houses. If that means lobbing metaphorical bombs instead of literal ones, so be it.
Yes, she is allows to keep the arcanomechanical limbs in parliament. No the cannon is not allowed to be loaded.
Next week, we get to see the invaders who recently conquered the city. Look forward to it!
Fan Art
This week, db-palette made some fan transformations for Witch Hunter Izana! You can find the originals on his Deviantart.
First up we have the Shadow form. I love a good goopy TF.
And here we have a silver TF! Caelyn happily grips the blade of the sword since her hands are metal, right? If you liked these, go check out db-palette’s other work. I know I have, who would have thought an artist I’ve followed for years would play my silly old game.
Curious Cat
There were so many questions this week that I didn’t even answer some and am going to do them in next week’s post. Hope you like pop culture stuff.
I did a lot of useful, good, very important stuff in the backend. In addition to cleaning up bugs, I made it possible to embed effects in the ability script and to auto-generate prediction prototypes based on the act data. You can still override predictions if you want, such as for tutorial abilities.
All of that is nonsense to most players but it’s really useful stuff to modders, and to me (I make the game, hello) because it will cut down on those errors where the prediction shows a different value than the actual because I tweaked the balance later on.
I will be fixing up the remaining bugs in chapter 1 and getting all the engine upgrades and requests for mod features this week. Hopefully I can start on the new stuff for chapter 1 then.
Meanwhile, Giga was sick for a bit but is BACK and is working on the TF sequence for Wisphags. We got a new format this time I think you’ll all like. Urimas is making sprites and Koops has delivered the enemy concepts we’ll be using in chapter 1 and chapter 2.
Concept Art! Again!
Remember last week when you got to see concepts for two noble houses? Well this week you get to see concepts for two noble houses, but not the same ones. Contain your shock.
Here we have the members of House Insiati. Until very recently the families making up the great House were associations of guilds, rather than strict families, but the invention of a neurological-mechanical interface and steam power caused a rapid change. Over the last 40 years, Insiati went from the richest house to the most productive house, made up of industrialists, factory owners, inventors, and scientists. Getting your hands dirty is a badge of honor, and many promising students have their educations covered if they are prepared to apply to join the great House.
Once thought to be the clear frontrunner among the great Houses, the recent war and conquest of the city has brought their rise into question.
And lastly we have House Artezzi, owners of the city’s merchant and combat navy. In addition to their estates within the city, they have control over the assorted islands in the harbour area, own all the major shipyards, and are in a fraught alliance with House Insiati in hopes of getting at their steamship technology.
Being the House of the sea means they were the least affected when the city was conquered, and may well be able to survive entirely off their overseas possessions. Their House does have a serious problem, though. The elder members are clinging to power despite being well past retirement, and the youth want to change the ways of the House. The impasse has brought a flagging of their fortunes recently, with many younger members leaving in frustration, while others plot to have the elders “taken care of”.
Big thanks to BlueLily for doing these. Next week we’ll start seeing some of the named characters of the houses and possibly getting hints at their storylines.
Fine, Poll Time
GOT YOU, IT WAS A SURPRISE DMITRI.
One of the things I wanted to avoid in RoP was the reliance on bad ends because I think getting to keep playing as a new form is cool and fun. A lot of games have bad ends because that, too, is fun, and people really enjoyed the “Latex Drone Christine” thing from chapter 5. I think I will add some of those non-canon bad ends to the game, as dream sequences or future vision. I do want to keep the keep-playing format of the game as much as possible, but clearly the audience wants some bad end stuff. Not a lot, but 36% is a sizeable minority.
Every now and then you lunatics really surprise me. The dragon bad end ties with the werewolf ending? The dragon bad end! That was one of the ones I put the least effort into, having done a rewrite right before it was implemented. Alraune got the hate it deserves, but dragon…
Anyway, the reclaimed ending also got a surprisingly strong following. I don’t know exactly what to make of these results because there’s no clear pattern (HOW DID SKELETON SCORE SO LOW ARRGGH) which is not what I expected at all.
I was worried the bonus bosses were too tough but it seems the playerbase rose to the challenge. Next time they will be bullshit.
So while the price point was about correct, some people thought it was a teeny bit too expensive. This is actually expected because gamers tend to underestimate what the cost of something ought to be. 15 bucks is a real bargain, in my opinion, but it is what it is.
Another very interesting result, not least of which because 5 players were in those time chambers from Dragon Ball Z that exist as a narrative device to power up a character in a “satisfying” way despite all the power levels being made up anyway because it’s a work of fiction.
While nobody blasted the game down in 5 hours, a decent chunk did it in 10. Our testers estimated 15 was the expected play time, so you’re ahead of the curve. Stop being so good at games. I was expecting a bigger block to be sitting at 15 and very few at >20 but there’s a big block at the 20 hour mark. It’s a bimodal distribution!
Unfortunately, the Steam statistics do show me an average playtime but they don’t specify if the player beat the game or not, so I can’t really use that and the value would skew low.
Our musician did a great job and everyone thinks he shouldn’t be fired and fed to the camel spiders.
I wanted to do crafting in WHI both as a way to make the game less-linear (you choose who gets what upgrade when) while increasing the focus on combat, and apparently I achieved that goal. Fixed placements can add a lot when a chest has a good item in it, but a lot of them are chaff or consumables. WHI instead makes every chest slightly important, where you almost always get something useful but rarely get anything profound (except the Omega equipment).
The fact that a lot of people like it means it’s a strong candidate to appear in a future game.
If I do make another project in he future, a smaller number of more consequential TFs is the easy winner. I love battle TF games but there’s not much of a way to increase the consequence of each transformation and still maintain the 20 TFs that WHI has. Also Chic would probably kill me if I did that again.
People loved the art, what can I say. Look I’ll try to convince her to work for Bottled Starlight but she’s very fiercely independent.
Pretty stroke here for putting in-battle voices to RoP. I’ve already asked the VAs for some auditions. If you’re the kind of maniac who wants to voice a video game, here’s the audition document for chapter 1.
FUCK YEAH! OR to put it another way, yeah people want to see more of these characters. The DLC will happen if/when the game sells 10,000 copies so that will be some time. Chic is open to doing a sequel but obviously not right now, and I gotta focus on RoP for a while. Will the sequel focus on Izana? Caelyn? Cyrano? Or will it be a prequel?
Yeah it’ll be a prequel and it’ll be about Heron, the dog, and his adventures. Triple platinum best seller, baby.
I know you’re all excited to see the results of last week’s poll but calm down, there’s an update to do first.
I am now cleaning up the various bugs from chapter 1 that have been accumulating. I may also take a shot at some QoL changes in the chapter. This is the “boring” part of game development, where each week I tell you about the exciting bugs I fixed.
Meanwhile, Koops fired out several new enemies, Giga got us a new talk sprite sheet for chapter 1 and is now working on the TF sequences (they’re special but I won’t spoil them even for patrons), Urimas is making sprites on pain of death, and even Wispy is back from vacation and promised… well nothing specific but I’m sure I’ll get more kitsunes soon.
Concept Art? Yes.
I asked noted fan artist BlueLily to design some costumes for chapter 3, because aristos can look cool even if you want to guillotine them. If you’ve played chapter 2, you know that Esmerelda de Artezzi is from Jeffespeir. Well guess what, there’s four great houses that run the city and they all have cool outfits.
Up first is House Cuorelli, better known as House Red.
But what’s going on here? Yes, part of the politics of the city is that a partirhuman cannot be appointed to an office. A workaround is that an existing office holder can be a partirhuman, but they can’t be re-appointed when their term is up. House Cuorelli is in charge of the city’s constabulary, so the sheriff here being transformed into a werefox means her political life is nearly over. It’s a popular way for the other houses to “humanely” get rid of their political opposition. You know, because assassinating them is viewed as barbaric.
Meanwhile, the city’s field military was controlled by House Ordinaci, or House Blue to most outsiders. However, an invading army recently conquered the city, and House Blue was wiped out. A handful of surviving members fled. Did they get turned into werewolves, dolls, and rubbery jesters? Yes but if you want to know more you’ll have to wait for chapter 3.
What about house Artezzi (Green) and Insiati (Yellow)? You’ll have to wait until next week to see those.
Stop Stalling and get to the Poll Results
Fine, geez. This is going to go question by question with a bit of discussion for each one. I made sure each question had an “Other” so people could give more complicated thoughts.
I just want you people to know that I have to hand-edit these replies in. I do it because I love you.
I am surprised that red robes got about 20% support for being flat out put in the game. I really thought that’d be a lot lower, because they act as beefgates that prevent you from running past enemies without engaging with the combat. WHI uses those to make sure the player can take on the frequent mandatory boss encounters, which RoP generally lacks.
They make a ton of sense in challenge areas, of which I can think of a few. Red Robes are just a formalization of the idea of a cutscene-miniboss. Equinox had a bunch of those, for example. Given a later poll question, Red Robes will likely get added to RoP in challenge areas or possibly an optional dungeon in chapter 2 themed around them. Get good at fighting, scrub!
As for the “Makes grinding too easy” schema, it makes it more convenient for sure but since you still have to beat the enemies, it only saves you a bit of time chasing down an enemy to wail on them. I don’t think it’s a huge issue in either direction, especially if they are confined to challenge areas.
For those of you who haven’t played chapter 2 yet, the crafting items are things like Light Carapace, Light Fiber, Light Leather, and then Tough Carapace, Tough Fiber, Tough Leather. There are also certain items that only drop from specific enemies, and only if you shoot them with Sanya’s rifle. Putting numerical tiers on things makes them a lot easier to understand and also easier to sort in your head. Plus, it also lets you know when you’re in an out-of-depth area (Westwoods is going to be Area 3, but it got released first so it’ll be rebalanced later).
The results are about what I expected here. The materials lose a bit of character by getting tiers but the utility is obvious. You’ll still need to get certain key items from hunting to make the best stuff, and those are uniquely named.
As expected the WHI interface is more popular by a lot. The RoP version does show the full crafting recipe for an item but anything more than 3 items and the recipe starts to get insanely long and requires in-screen scrolling. Highlighting what’s available and letting the player see what it costs with a click is a lot more intuitive. I’ve seen RPGMaker games that use this system and for once the UI works way better that way.
If you have an idea for how to make the UI even better hit me up. Until then we’ll go with the WHI version.
The results are pretty strongly in favour of a backport job for the other chapters. There is a sizeable opposition to just leaving them in chapter 2, which does make sense because chapter 2 is nonlinear and uses crafting to set equipment standards, so getting materials makes a lot of sense. Chapters 1 and 5 don’t need that sort of thing, though the Tellurium Mines fulfill that functionality since there’s always more stuff when the levels regenerate.
The strongest case to be made is to put them in every chapter even when they aren’t necessary, and make it a basic game mechanic. After all, chapter 1 is here to teach you how to play the game, even if it’s so short that you don’t need the extra stuff.
After a bunch of discussion with some utterly despicable Discord users (Pyxxis) and several upstanding Discord users (everyone else) I came up with a system. Green chests will continue to exist and will still provide the player with random low-level goodies like cash or gems, but most green chest pickups will provide Tokens. These tokens can be used to roll on charts of items, so you can choose if you’d like to roll on the weapons chart or the gems chart or the armors chart. Collecting more green chests (without resting at a campfire) increases your odds of getting extra tokens, rather than WHI’s method of giving you more materials per chest opened.
All of this token stuff is totally optional, you will find all the equipment you need from chests. I just like the idea of a playthrough being a little different each time around, and getting a lucky weapon or weird accessory from a roll makes that a little more possible. First time players will more likely find there’s a gap or two in their equipment and use the rolls to fill it because they missed the Werecat Bonus Area which has the really good accessories or whatever.
Tell me what you think of my really bad ideas!
If you didn’t play WHI: In that game, adamantite nodes appear in the overworld. Each time you rest (return to town) they reset but spawn in different locations at random. You could still get adamantite from chests but having dedicated nodes in certain areas meant the player always had a good stock of it without competing for other chest items.
And to the purple person: Chapter 1 will be limited to the first two tiers of adamantite, chapter 5 the first 3, and chapter 2 probably the first 3 with a bonus area having the 4th. You won’t be able to make max-tier gems in RoP until chapter 6.
Overally, people like adamantite nodes so I’ll add some of those. Unlike WHI I’m going to be a lot more choosy with where they are. WHI has a very linear layout so I needed to put them in the player’s path, and bonus areas like the beach and springs had a bunch of high-value nodes at the ends of the paths. In RoP, nodes will likely only appear in certain areas, like in the dry areas of Quantir and Arbonne, but not in Starfield Swamp. In chapter 5, nodes will appear in the Tellurium Mines and Serenity Crater. It will be a deliberate choice by the player to go looking for more adamantite if they need it, rather than finding it all over the place.
Chapter 2 will have a lot of nice caves to find it, and there’s a few quarries in Westwoods you’ll just love (beware the local wind elementals).
(I think that last reply got a little tripped over its own language)
In WHI, I removed EXP and made it so the player only gets money from battle, and can spend that money to level up their party. I did that because I thought it was interesting in terms of weighing cash against upgrades (gem improvements, equipment), level-ups, and skill purchases (there’s no JP in WHI). It also incidentally allowed certain players to beat the bonus bosses at level 12 so there’s that.
A small group wants to go entirely to Platina, no EXP. Most people want to keep EXP but let the player “sink” their platina to get more EXP. I think that’s probably the best idea, allowing players to spend cash to catch up party members who are behind (or focus all their resources on making Zeke level 100) or just get rid of excess money when they’ve bought all the stuff they wanted. It adds to the nonlinearity and make-each-playthrough-different too, particularly for players who know their way around and can get the best gear without spending money.
For those of you who want a low-level challenge, I’ll make a special option that zeroes EXP gain, just for you. It’s on my to-do list.
This one is pretty simple. Paragons act like Omega enemies in WHI do, but without the activator and random placement system. Instead, Omega enemies guard the best treasure in the game.
A majority wants to keep the paragons as they are and add some bonus supa-tuff areas where 100% of the enemies are paragons. Happy to oblige, it means I can put in some optional areas with cool items and you can get the ultimate challenge from groups of paragons. You thought fighting one gravemarker paragon was bad?
Paragons will also be getting a dedicated balance pass to make them a particularly tough enemy, rather than getting multipliers to stats.
Pretty overwhelmingly in favour of on-field enemy sprites. Hey, we need a make-work program to keep our spriters housed and fed, too!
(You and Urimas decide if that’s worth it though) <- lawl like Urimas has a say >:3
Pumpkin continues to be insanely popular, but Whiskey also has some “legs” as they say.
One respondent apparently got confused and replied with the name of a country. I will not be providing Poland Pix.
Here Pumpkin is seen trying to steal a bite of beef jerky.
Whiskey caught, gutted, and refitted these fish into fashionable footwear.
Generalized WHI Feedback Form
You can fill it out here. This one is just to find out what sorts of things people liked on a basic level. Did you like the skeleton bad end? What about the harpy one? Now it’s time for me to figure out which unique set of brainrots the audience has.
Curious Cat
Fan Art
This counts as fan art by HadezMuze because technically, Sweet Justice is a character created by Koops to represent me, and she’s in this picture. That makes it fan art.
I would have posted it anyway because it’s awesome and I love it but now I am technically not in the wrong!
Wow I think the democratic response to the poll question is overwhelming. People want Pumpkin.
But the runner up, secrebots, will definitely be in chapter 5. At the meeting today we decided on our immediate course of action. 0: Some code refactors. Backend stuff, I have already changed a lot of code I had been putting off for months while WHI was in development. The autobuild system was overhauled, a lot of things are named Star instead of Sugar, and the repository comes with dependencies in it for OSX and Windows. 1: Witch Hunter Izana support. Bugfixes and QoL stuff. That will be most of this week. 2: Chapter 1 update. This one will take a few months, it contains a couple new tfs and quests. The new art is mostly done (good job Giga!) but I was busy with WHI so I haven’t even started on the code or mapping. 3: Chapter 5 update. 1 new quest and TF, the secrebots! This means I will also have an excuse to issue a bugfix on the chapter and people will help make sure I didn’t break things even worse. I have something very special planned out for this quest, trust me. We will also attempt to add the 55’s Sundress costume for this release as well. 4: Harpy Tower Defense. The long awaited harpy TD update, a playable minigame with integration into the rest of the chapter.
After those are done, we’ll be proceeding with the rest of chapter 2. So a series of smaller updates and an excuse to cram in bugfixes, then the main event.
Witch Hunter Izana: Hard Mode Threshold Passed
Yep, at 500 units sold I said we’d make Hard Mode. Well that has happened, so it’s on my to-do list. Hard Mode will both affect normal gameplay as it will add a bunch of new abilities to unlock via attuned charms, and be its own mode you can play. You’ll need to start a new game to access it, as the NPC who activates Hard Mode disappears once you defeat the first boss.
Hard Mode is intended to be the kind of gameplay mode for experts where you need to use all your tricks to get through enemies. They’re both tougher and smarter, with new AIs and abilities designed to give you problems. Losing has never been more fun!
Exactly when Hard Mode is going to come out depends on a lot of factors, probably some time after the chapter 5 update. It doesn’t require much new art (there may or may not be new enemies added) so it’s all coding stuff, but it’s also a serious refactor and make take a lot of tweaking to get the balance just right.
Witch Hunter Izana: Feedback for RoP Poll
WHI added several new ideas, both for combat and for how to organize things like crafting, item nodes, and level ups. Some of these might work in RoP, some might not! I have my own opinions but you know I want to hear yours, too.
If you missed it, the game is out on Steam and Itch.io! For the next week or so I will be doing bugfixes on it and adding in NG+ which I didn’t have time for before release. There have already been a few serious bugs patched out, hopefully I can get the rest in due time.
Once all of that is done, I will be doing some backend stuff on the engine that I had been holding off on for the past year or so. It’s not a good idea to redo a lot of engine stuff while working on a game. Now that the game is out, I can refactor some of the code I have been meaning to for a while.
Urimas, having busted his ass making the game’s sprites, is taking a few days off. He will then be working on getting the new forms in chapter 1 ready. Once my code refactoring is done, I’ll start work on the chapter 1 update as well. I also intend to spend a week or two cleaning up all the RoP bugs that have built up since there’s a lot of those too.
There will also be a 5$ patron vote this week, so don’t miss it!
Pandemonium Development 