Progress update

Hi everyone! Here's a progress report on what's coming.

A raw game design podcast episode is in the works. It will cover some things in Codex as well as Fantasy Strike (the fighting game).

All the Codex early access cards have shipped!

There will be a minor update to the Codex rulebooks pretty soon. Most notably it will clarify the new rule for casting Ultimate spells is that your hero must have been at max level at the start of the turn to cast their ultimate spell that turn. There will be a few other updates and clarifications too.

Some balance changes are in the works for Codex, but it will be a little while on that. Still gathering feedback and figuring out how to address it. Just know that changes are in the work based on your feedback.

We are working on several aspects of the Fantasy Strike fighting game. First, the parts that are not going well. We still need another animator who's very skilled at 3D combat animation. We still need a visual effects artist and also an environmental artist for the stages. For the stages, we've spent a fair amount of effort trying to get concept art together and we're having trouble finding someone to just do basic sketches that capture the concept of a stage without breaking our bank (we need to save up all the money we can for another animator). So yeah, staff-wise we still need a lot.

That said, we're making progress in several areas. Although I said in a previous update that Grave's rigging and skinning were improved to give us a better foundation for animation, I didn't realize at the time that we really weren't there yet. We're still working on that, and once it's finished, animations we do AFTER that will just look better and they won't need to be revamped to catch up with changing models and rigs anymore. We are not really able to to progress on new animations for Grave until the rigging and skinning are complete. Hopefully that's pretty soon.

Also, Jaina's character model will be updated to be a comparable quality to Grave's. Everyone really liked the latest Grave character model, so that's going to be the style of the rest.

We're fixing several bugs and even more underlying system problems. There are some really crazy bugs that have to do with collision detection, and as we remove more and more defects like that, we seem to get a better intangible feel. Some of these bugs actually make Jaina vs Rook even harder for Rook than it should be.

We're doing some balance changes to Grave, Jaina, and Rook. This is just the regular process of iteration after we have more experience playing the game. No specifics to report quite yet, but expect slightly better tuning overall.

We're working on the gameplay of a fourth character now: Valerie. I chose her because we already have two fireball characters, and we have the very different gameplay style of a grappler, so the most important dynamic to test out now is a non-fireball, rushdown character. We have a fair amount of her in place, but she'll still need more work and more tuning before I would really call her "playable" in the sense the other characters are. Working on it though!

Thank you to all patrons for your support. Codex is developing well and the fighting game is costing more than I really have, but the money you all are contributing goes directly toward offsetting all the staffing costs. And as I mentioned, we could sure use more staff!

Thank you again to everyone helping making these games possible.