Happy Summer Everyone!
Sorry for always being late – eventually it turned out that “in a month or so” can mean 3 months… at least there has been progress not only with the skill system, but new buildings and creatures were added too, or for example having a mere look at the list of in-game stats lead to changing a ton of things from saved games to achievements to the outcome panel. I also made several, mostly successful attempts to make the game run more smoothly.
Most of the skills must be familiar to GCCS veterans. One of the new additions is the Orb of Presence skill, which gives banishment bonus, as well as those tiny orblets that can be stolen by the monsters (formerly that feature was a battle trait, but, unlike other traits, it made the game mostly easier while also providing an XP bonus, so it had to switch teams).
To bring pylons into the game / have players give them a try, it got its own Pylons skill, while Seeker Sense (bottom right skill) is also a new one giving shadow core and monster kill XP bonuses.
Gem wasps are one of my favorite features and I wanted to make them more powerful and not just a nice trick for the first few levels, so the Demolition skill (top right) makes wasps live longer, sting stronger, and have a higher attack range. Wasps now also follow the mouse pointer, so they can be lead to where the action is.
As we are slooowly getting closer to release, I plan to add more random battle screenshots to give more grip on the general look and feel of the game, until the trailer, and in the end, the game itself finally arrives.
Some months ago I was pretty sure a June 2019 release would be possible, so I really should not talk about any release date until actually having at least a release candidate build. At the moment, I have a nice layed out plan for this summer, 40 tasks for the next 12 weeks, including blogposts about the battle traits and the talisman. But we all know that has to be taken with a pinch of brackets and question marks. Our kids will have a summer break, so there will be a lot of family days to be spread through the summer (there are some GDC talks on YT about having kids and working as an indie dev, I’m a bit relieved I’m not the only one struggling with time management). If this summer goes as planned, we will be very close to release, and if not, we’ll still be lots of steps closer.
Have a great summer, I hope I’ll have more to write about soon!
