Sadie Gets a Life, 0.3.7 Dev Log, 2026-10-15
For this week's dev log, I'll give you a sneak peek of coming attractions and also cover my latest quality of life project.
Sneak Peek 1: Coming Events
As I mentioned in last week's dev log, I'm working to wind down many of the side operations in Harmonia. We'll get our final Adventurers' Guild mission, in which the Missionaries of Steel simulate serving as the first wave of an invasion force against a unit of the Freistadt Army's Static Defense Forces. We'll have another Backdoor Diplomacy operation in which Sadie performs a series of good deeds, but there are some negative consequences that Ellanon can help with.
Speaking of Ellanon, the primary naughty scene for this release involves Ellanon, Sadie, and Claude (the hotelier who, to this point, hasn't had much of a role aside from welcoming the party to The Bottom Rung Hotel). Sadie will also celebrate Neemar's birthday and, with the help of Karin, unlock some hidden potential in Landon. In addition, there are a few more scenes, but you'll have to wait for the release to learn about them.
Sneak Peek 2: Anime Mode Revamp
The second topic is a bit more fun. I like the idea of Anime Mode--where we get to see cinematic views of what Sadie and party are doing on each turn--but I wasn't particularly happy with most of the pictures. The prior release fixed some of Mallory's Steal actions, and I decided to go whole-hog in this release.
I have three goals with this revamp. First, a lot of the skills were hard to distinguish based on the images. Granted, there's only so much you can do, for example, with "swing an axe," but I figured I could do better. Second, there was too much inconsistency with images. Granted, I'll probably never have 100% consistency, as that's the nature of generated images, but again, I could do better. And third, there weren't enough images. I started with a goal of having 4 images per skill and randomly selecting one of those four. That works fine until you think about how many times a player is liable to call Gouge or Seduce and see the same four images over and over.
With these three goals in mind, I've built an entire workflow for creating Anime Mode images, making it considerably easier to generate new ones. So far, I have Sadie and Dinestra completed. To give you an example of the new style, here's an example of Sadie, specifically her Gouge attack.
We have metallic claws and a woman clearly having fun as she eviscerates a foe.
For her psychic skills, I decided to lean into the body horror thing a bit. Here's an example of her Psychic Poke attack.
For her psychic attacks, she gets inside the enemy's head (with the conceit that you're observing her through the eyes of a foe), making herself look more monstrous as she causes both mental and physical damage to her unlucky target. The glowing eyes, evil smile, monstrous-looking hands, and spikes growing out of her show just how intimidating she is to the hapless schmo who's in her way.
But not all of Sadie's images are about her looking one step away from going full evil. Here's an example of Sadie's Heal spell.
Of course the scary woman with claws can also be angelic. It's the duality of (wo)man. I think that, on the whole, these are a lot better than what I originally had, though I did keep around some of my favorite old-style images. And for the skills you're likely to use most frequently, I've packed in quite a few more images. Recover, for example, has 30 separate images the game can call on. Seduce has 27 (and I really enjoy the idea of a woman wearing scary metallic claws successfully flirting with and charming her enemy). Granted, most of these are images on a given theme, so don't expect radical differences from image to image, but it should at least be less repetitive and more apropos to the action at hand.
Speaking of apropos, Dinestra typically shows a considerable amount of rage in her images, as you would expect from someone whose fighting style is "Get really angry and then hit things even harder."
Even her "magical" skills, like Point of Pride, are willpower-based rather than magical in nature.
With Point of Pride, a bloody and bruised Dinestra doesn't have a magical ability to mend wounds or heal herself; she simply refuses to give in and makes use of that inner well of strength to go beyond where another warrior would surrender or fall.
I also desexualized her armor a bit, fitting more with her personality as someone who understands that armor works better when it actually covers skin.
Over the course of the next week or so, I'll try to knock out more of these images. I will eventually get all of them updated (including Sadie's succubus form), but how many of them make the 0.3.7 release will depend upon how quickly I can implement the scenes that serve as the linchpin of this release. The Anime Mode revamp is definitely the secondary priority. And I'll keep telling Product Manager me that as I queue up another giant batch of skill images.