Dev diary - August 2024

Earlier this month I posted about my plans for the next update, I'm here to give you an idea of what's going on.

For the quick rundown, I'm basically 50% done. I spent the first few days after the release managing the release and the community. It's amazing to actually have a community, thank you so much for being here. I've been stressing a bit about the next update, not going as fast as I wanted, but nothing major. It's good stress, I basically just need to better plan my breaks.
The expected release date for the next update if everything goes right is September 13th.

It will mainly include:

• Level 3 and stage 3 for all characters: (completion: 30%)

The main focus of the update. On the gameplay side, I added a bunch already. Stage 3 is well on its way, and except for Ruby, I created most of the cardpool for the characters, including new level 1 and 2 cards for added variety. What's lacking is dialogs, scenes, and events. Haven't done anything yet on that point, and it's going to take the majority of these next two weeks.

• Shop and items: (completion: 80%)

Gold finally has its use. Shops and items are basically fully functional right now. The only thing I need is to add more items for added variety. It felt like an important piece of the game missing, but it wasn't necessary for a first release, and I wanted to take more time to polish the system. I could still add a few things, but I'm pretty happy with the way things flow now.

• Reworked game flow: (completion: 100%)

Not a major modification, but with the addition of shops and items I wanted to give the player more agency over what they can get. For instance, you sometimes are able to choose paths between a shop and a fight, or a normal vs an average fight, while being able to see what the reward is going to be. Experience gain is a bit more organic as well, and all difficulty levels go through 13 rooms per floor, including potential shops. Also, as the number of stages will increase with updates, the duration of a run can potentially become pretty long in the future. While the game is planned for this type of rhythm, I also added a way to shorten the early game.

• Progress tracking: (completion: 80%)

Multiple people have been confused with the way unlocks and progress work. I'm adding indicators to make it clearer, including unlock screens as you complete a quest, progress and quest reminder in the character select screen, and a tab to check your progress. This tab keeps track of stats like number of runs or play time for each character and difficulty setting, as well as a rundown of your previous runs and the deck you used. Unlocks are also now split by difficulty level (challenge unlocks progress for casual). I just need to add item tracking and correct a bug or two.

• Quality of life updates: (completion: 100%)

A focus for this update is to overall increase the quality of the game. This includes making rid of the small frustrations you'd like to see removed when playing. I added a few of those, including for instance a fast animation mode, choice to see complete/fast/no growth sequence you've already seen when leveling up, being able to check the deck and discard, seeing the enemies names, etc...

Working on all of that, I realize that you'd like to have more horny in a branded adult game. Me too. That's gonna be the focus of the update after that, so please have a bit of patience. You'll still get growth and stuff in this update, don't worry.

In the meantime, meet Mezuri. One of the shopkeepers you can meet in the maze :D