July 14 Update (Patreon)

That overview of the coming updates is still on its way, but there's no time for that, there's progress to discuss! This week's post will cover various updates, ranging from standard to exciting to a request for assistance from any resident coders.

The next update will be the last optional dungeon, which will also be the last real combat in the game (the epilogue is more story than challenge). I figured this is also a good time to reconsider various details about combat, rather than before when new scripts/details might have gotten in the way of people enjoying the final battle.

Now, in general I'm going to leave TLS's combat as it is, because whether people love or hate it, the general balance is part of the game's character. However, I do intend to make some tweaks in order to make it a better version of itself, which I'll get into below.

Uyae's Stances

I've never liked spending a whole turn on her stances, but when I first designed her combat, I didn't have options. Now I know about scripts that can change things: Uyae's stances are now free actions that don't use up her turn. There's a cooldown so she can't switch constantly, but you can adopt a stance and then still choose an action.

And since I included scripts for that...

New Skills For Everyone

Every main combat character is getting one or two new skills to supplement their main set. These aren't meant to deeply alter balance, just make all the characters a little more flexible and interesting. Maybe they get an ability to do something they usually can't, once per battle. Maybe they get a skill that's minor, but a free action that doesn't take their turn. That sort of thing.

The plan is for these skills to be learned at set character levels, which means they'll be just retroactive changes for those up to date, but I hope they'll make the game and the harem continue to feel dynamic throughout. The characters build their base skills early on for obvious reasons, but I hope between these and the synergy skills the game overall has a nice arc of growth. When I see people make comments about characters shifting in usefulness throughout the game I consider that to be good; a game with this many characters should encourage changing them up throughout its runtime.

There will be no equivalent boost to enemies, though, so on average these skills will make the game easier. Unless things really feel unbalanced, I think that's fine. The new skills may need some workshopping to get them all balanced, though.

Vhala Equipment

So, when I gave Vhala her base equipment, I wanted her to start with a good off-hand to imply she's competent and has her own history, but I underestimated how useful this item is. Thus, according to optimizers, this is still her best-in-slot item, which isn't what you want in an RPG.

I've added a bunch of off-hand equipment for her, ranging from alternate build items from different stores to items that only appear under certain plot circumstances, building up to superior equipment tied to major decisions/quests. Again, this is a minor thing that will be almost irrelevant to finished saves (other than going to buy one thing), but I hope it will improve the game overall.

LUK and RPG Maker

People say all sorts of things about the Luck statistic, but those familiar with RPG Maker know that it really doesn't do much. Some games go out of their way to invoke it more, and I've done a small amount with it in TLS, but it isn't the most important statistic.

So I was thinking... can't we just change that? The problem is, I think I'd need a coder to make this happen properly. I've seen the formula for LUK's influence on status effects and think it could stand to be altered a little so each point has more effect. But just changing the code directly is bad practice, and if we're already doing the script, maybe we could do a little more as well?

I don't know if I'll get any volunteers, or I suppose it's possible a script already exists, but this is one of the things I can't do myself. (EDIT: Got everything taken care of! Thanks much to Lord Forte.)

Anyway 

The combination of these things is just one of the components I'm working on for the next update! I do want to get as much of the game finished this year as possible, but I'm also looking forward to the long term and trying to make TLS the most satisfying version of itself that I can. Thanks for your support. ^-^