Devblog #99

Hey Wizards!
Shady Character One here!

I have made myself a promise last week that I immediately broke. I am really trying to get myself to write at least two thousand words a week. Preferably more than that. Three or four would be even better. But even last week I only wrote a tad over one thousand words. I did write another event for Gwen.

Writing Gwen is an interesting endeavor. Of course, I am always trying to write all the girls as living people. They are the main heroes of their own stories. They have their fears, desires, and histories. But Gwen is a little bit different. When I write Gwen, I write her as the main hero of her own dating game. She takes the initiative most of the time, and it is you who has to make her want to pursue you - and it is she who does the pursuing. At least from her perspective. Gwen is also the character who is the most intertwined with the tournament plotline of the game, and she has probably the most at stake in how it is going, so that adds a bit more complexity to her story.

Of course, Gwen isn't the only character who takes particular interest in how well you do on your Trials. Even though most of the girls won't really care if you win or lose, as long as you are fine yourself, Elizabeth still wants you to do well and show the most of your abilities. And well, there's another character who is very invested in your performance during the Cup of Cathal, and who seems to have a pretty passionate fan-base even though she is yet to get her first event. I am talking about our Egyptian champion - Bassant.

Bassant's storyline was supposed to be added to the game months ago, almost a year now, but I made a judgment call and decided not to spread our strength even more than it already was, so her story was pushed back in the pipeline. Depending on how the rest of the recent poll goes, she just might have her time in the limelight soon. If you haven't voted on the poll, by the way, you should still have a few more weeks to do so as of the moment of me writing this. Though, I am not sure that many people would be happy with how I see her story. I will not spoil too much, but I will just say that Bassant is a very forceful girl and that her story would have you make some decisions concerning the tournament that you are both competing in.

Speaking of tough choices. After a long, long time I think I finally found a solution to the constant stream of requests to remove the skill degradation from the game. Put down your celebratory flutes of champagne, wizards - the skill degradation is not going anywhere, but I think I figured out a good way to let the third set of skill items alleviate this matter a bit. After all, it isn't like I am giving the player an option to just choose and disable the mechanic. They will have to spend some money to buy the item in the first place, and that will help balance things out somewhat. Another reason I didn't want to add items just to negate a mechanic that you can negate in other ways or just disregard, was that it would be useless to those players. To make those items not completely useless to people who are getting around stat degradation in other ways, I decided these five items should also "upgrade" the Rest option for restoring Stamina. Rest falls off a bit as the players get arguably better options over time, so this will give them some extra incentive to use good old Rest instead of taking a bath or spending their time in town. This one also circles back a bit to the importance of player feedback. I don't think I would've paid this much attention to the stat degradation mechanic if not for people constantly mentioning it. And the idea of items improving the Rest mechanic came from a fan, so you could all thank him for finally getting these items.

I am still working out the quirks and thinking on exact values for those items, but you can bet that you'll see more curiosities on the store shelves soon. Maybe I'll have some teasers next week.

Until then,
Shady Character One, out!