Development Diary #115

"Alright! This is taking shape!"

Time for a development diary. First of all we'll let you know the status of the update (we are sure you are willing to know how much more time is needed to play 1.0), but we'll also talk about the battles you will find in 1.0 and what's next after 1.0:

• Script/story written for the update with over 20.000 words (DONE)

• 6 new H-scenes (DONE)

• 6 more Adapted H-scenes (DONE)

• 3 Foreplay animations and adapting them for 2 girls (Mostly DONE)

• O'vanthan idles (DONE)

• Other side character idles and variations of current ones (DONE)

• About 12 new backgrounds (11 out of 12 DONE)

• New art assets needed for Battles (ALL DONE, EXCEPT SOME ART EFFECT FOR SOME ATTACKS)

• 8 New CGs (Mostly DONE)

• Lots of other minor art additions (Mostly DONE)

It happened with Space Paws and it's also happening with Shuggerlain. When you are working on a closure update there are a lot of minor art assets needed beyond H-scenes, background, idle animations and all that. Battles for example took a lot of development time because unlike any other update we are working in... 4 different battles for a single update. Only in the Dir-Klou update we needed to work on 2 battles in a same update (choosing Teigan or choosing Hazel) and that already was quite time consuming. Anyway, the good news is this work is practically already finished :D

Ok, and why 4 battles? Let's talk about a bit about this: (light spoilers ahead, nothing to worry about if you played 0.90)

After the previous happenings in the game, in this update you will arrive to Attonil. And you will find the Araxian Defense of the capital. This will be without any doubt the hardest battle of the whole game.
The difficult will be a bit different depending on your journey through Shuggerlain delivering nations and getting allies. But of course doing this takes time, and this will directly change the endings and battles you will receive later (remember the warning on days 80 and 100 we added a few updates ago? Anyway these numbers may vary if in the testing/balancing phase will find 80 days is too generous or too hard)

If you achieve victory (congrats!) after some scenes and events you will find another battle. This battle has some peculiarities.
1) It will be the final battle
2) You will face different enemies according to the days spent
3) You won't be able to reinforce bettween the previous battle and this one (yup, if you won the previous battle with only 500-1000 soldiers remanings for example, you will have a bad time. You've been warned)
4) Taking point 3 in mind, for this battle we've recovered the "Choice action Battle" that many of you will remember we used in some early update of the game. This means you may be screwed with the soldiers remaining, BUT you have the chance to be able to win even with low numbers if you have the proper troops and take the proper decisions. It'll be a pure decision making battle. No units to choose at the bottom, only choices.
(We somehow wanted to recover the Roselyn, Nebet, Siaren and Vyl Daemith final quiz, but in this case in "battle form").

As you can guess a lot of the remaining work is also about finding a fair balance in all this (days, money, soldiers, difficulty of the 3 different routes and their battles, etc) and it's part of the current work right now.

Ok, and about what next. I'll try to be brief:

In this update we worked on 3 differents endings for Izuin, and 3 different endings for Dynae + battles + all the plot stuff.

So basically after this one we'll work on the endings of the next 6 girls of the game (each girl will have 1 ending, unlike Dynae or Izuin). And the next girls will be:
Nadine, Saraith, Luth, Vex, Yraselle and Atzi.

And the goods news is that despite having more girls, that one and the remaining updates will be considerably shorter to develop than this one (Seriously guys, thanks for the patience!)

And I think that's more than enough for now.
We are in the finishing+balancing+polishing part, so just a bit more, guys ;)