Progress Log 12/23/20 - What an insane week! (Patreon)

With the Character Creation update out of the way, it’s time for us to implement some more mechanics into the game. This past week has been curve ball after curve ball between the Shady Corner collab and the problem with Steam and Germany. We're still trying to wait for something official from Steam in regards to the German market, but it's not looking promising and that door may be closed for good. Patreon, itch.io and what not are still fair game, though we're being cautious. But moving on!

The next update for Crystal Road revolves mostly around Skills and EXP for the player. We're probably going to call them Skills instead of perks so the chart is a bit off. These skills are broken down into categories, and can be ranked up by performing tasks around the world. Farming crops for example.

Each time the player levels up a skill category, they’ll get to select from 1 of 2 skills per level. In the image above, the Crops path will contain skills that benefit crops, whereas the livestock path will focus more on tending to farm animals. Each node will contain info about the skills and what benefits it brings, such as buffs, movement speed, etc.

The five categories of skills that will be in the game are Farming, Scavenging, Love, Fishing and Mining. The last two of which will be locked until we implement the actual mechanics pertaining to them. Depending on how it goes, we may also need to set a lower level cap and add content as we go for the other categories.

We do intend to let players respec at some point in the game, as well as a way of getting more than 10 skills when nearing the end of the game, but for now this should be a good start. There will also be some skills that tie into the story and are only obtainable as the game continues.

With all of this comes the actual leveling mechanic, which we've gone ahead and created a nice little animation for.

Aside from this, we’re going to try and include some more story content and properly introduce Hazel in this patch, as well as add more animations to the player’s overworld sprite for things such as eating and watering.

That's all for now and we hope you guys have safe holidays!

-Vanis & Doku