Progress Report 29

Greetings. It's me.

This week, I've been working on Aster's passive skill tree and actually implementing a big part of the passives - designing new ones, redesigning two-week-old ones, and trying to make the whole thing make sense. Not only as a skill tree for a battle unit, but also as a girl getting corrupted and loved in an H-game... So this is a tricky one, especially when it comes to weaving corruption, its traces, and its causes directly into the tree.

I didn't mention this earlier because I thought I'd quickly come up with solid solutions anyway - and I somewhat did, though not for every single skill node yet. On my (intentionally) low-quality picture you can see three main colors, each representing a stat - nothing unusual there. Green (heart?) for dexterity and long-term alignment toward supporting Mentor, blue (crescent?) for intelligence and being Hero's support, red for strength and being able to solo the dungeon, white for some common/neutral/general passives, and other colors for hybrid passives.

The challenge is making at least half of these nodes carry a drawback - something that makes Aster a bit more vulnerable to "exciting situations". Honestly, this turned out even trickier than avoiding accidental suspicious "shuriken-looking" patterns when placing the nodes. I know I shouldn't spend too much time polishing this stage since feedback will inevitably make me rebalance and move things around, but I just can't leave them as simple "+1 STAT" or "+3 ATK", nor as blunt as "New rule: now Mentor can officially penetrate Aster so she learns magic faster. +35% Spell DMG". Even if I decide that some passive isn't worth taking a skill node in the tree, in the middle of implementing it or after, I'll probably move it to an equipment item passive effect.

Next week, I hope to be finally satisfied with Aster's tree and finish Hero's tree as well - which feels a lot easier. After that, I plan to test a couple of new ideas I've come up with to make Delve gameplay a bit more varied and unpredictable. Still mostly punishing... but sometimes rewarding!

That's all for today. Thank you for your support. Until next time!