Progressing In Good Order

Lots of success so far. Having more time to work on things gives me a lot of freedom to experiment where I would have rushed before. Thusfar I have added scripts that allow enemies to chase the player with varied speed when they see you al la Lunar, and also made zones that restricts their movement so they won't chase you endlessly. This means that monsters chase you if you get too close but can't chase you past their "section". So if you were trying to sneak past a monster and avoided them when they chased you you could reach a section they cannot pass. I think this will make monsters much more engaging.

I'm also working out a proper support system for the game and working on improving the three starting slaves to teach you how to use heroines will use later, better. For instance Alexia now uses the "purity" ability to cure a few status effects such as poison. This will also help with complaints about status effects. I'm making sure there are proper counters to everything. I'm also working on spells with an "area of effect" so that attacks have more variance than one or nothing; it'll also help me differentiate the various characters more and help the game from a tactical perspective.

I don't know that I'll have time this month to do much more than fix combat and make the big battle, but I've got some nice plans.

As you may be aware Audr and Bilbine's chapters weren't the strongest. They didn't have a proper reversal like Nanshe and Branda did, and it shows. But I've sat down, read a lot of comments, and crunched on their sections. They were the least well defined in the planning stage and I don't think I could have fully figured them out without your feedback. I now have a very solid understanding of where I want them to go, however. Audr will become more of a selfish and greedy person and that can be played out with Captain Oola. Bilbine will be partially robotized. I might have some slight alterations made to the images to reflect this, but probably not much.

I'm strongly considering remaking Skree as a fist-user character type. She's always been more of the Ayla sort (a character from Chrono Trigger - look it up) and Audr is the bow user. To go along with this I'm looking into various things that will make everything work well that way.

I've also put together an ability system separate from the Default "Special" "Magic" and etc ones. This allows for individualized special abilities for each character. For instance Skree's Vampirism can be selected and act straight away. Audr already has "Steal" programmed in as a command and she is capable of stealing items from enemies. These could work well with the orb of dominion, allowing you to, say, upgrade Skree's Vampirism to drain both health and mana or Audr's Steal skill to become like FFVI's Mug command and do damage when stealing.

Also people have asked for it for a long time, so I'll make it so that enemies can respawn. With the changes I'm making I think it's a fairly good idea. In order to make the arenas still relevant I'll work on a tier system with some unique rewards for completing a "ladder".

I'm also going to look back on your feedback and start remaking some of the least popular maps. Don't necessarily expect that to happen this month, however.

I have some concept art of the sixth heroine here: Ilmatar. The Finnish-based Ice Spirit heroine. I had some pictures of her done forever ago but felt her design from that period didn't fit where I was going with her in the game. So I'm paying out-of-pocket to have her redrawn in a new style.

I have all the monstergirl pictures in and will also work on getting the Monstergirl village into the game ASAP.

One final note: If you paid to get the bonus gallery last month there will be even more pictures in it this month. There are four pictures of Skree done by Mindwipe just recently. Here's a preview of one of them:

I'm going to add an $20 reward this month. Stay tuned for it!