Devlog dec 26th - Final Companions

 Welcome to the second devlog in December (and the last one for the year)

Last update we got a bit behind on creating some characters due to illness. But now we've created them, so here they are:

First is this Lycan (That's what we decide to call these wolf-persons who live in the game's world), who is worried about her little sister. She's too poorly to go look for her herself.

Finding the little sister is going to be one of the side quests in the game 

We haven't yet drawn the quest area where the sister can be found, but the sister herself looks like this

The two sisters uses the same colours

Next op, we have two characters who will join the party. Alexia is a strong and proud minotaur. 

For Alexia, we've so far drawn the portrait, four combat poses and a walk animation consisting of 12 images.

Kara is a harpy with some very unusual wings. 

We added a shadow to Kara's images to make it clear that that she's floating above the ground. If we find the time, we could go through all older images and add shadows as well

The two new companions will probably feel quite different in combat. Alexia will be big, strong and sturdy. She will have abilities that defend the other characters. Kara will be elusive and mobile, but very vulnerable if an enemy manages to hit her. Her combat abilities will also be a little unconventional.

In the final game, there will be a total of 6 companion characters and with Kara and Alexia, we have now drawn them all!

We've started to implement some of the abilities the companions will have, starting with Thecla, a priestess with lightning powers.

Thecla starts out with two abilities: One is a ranged attack called Zap, which deals Air aspected damage. It also gives a buff to the enemy that reduces the damage from further Air attacks.

The second is a melee attack that deals damage and also removes the buff. The idea is to incentivise switching between the two abilities. All the abilities that Thecla gets will probably tie into this kind of mechanic in one way or another.

Try try to make the Ability popups as clear as possible, so the player understands how the ability works. Hopefully we succeed, otherwise we can adjust the descriptions based on player feedback

The parts of the game that handles adding and removing buffs had to be expanded a bit to make this work correctly.

Since the year is ending, we also had to spend a bit of time doing the annual accounts. Everything should be in order now, but unfortunately it did take away a bit of time to work on the game. 

Next update will be January 9th. I think we'll use that update to take another look at the schedule for the year. Our main focus will be preparing for the second play test. This will be the only round of testing we have time for before release, so we want to include as much as possible.

Talk to you then!