After transferring just over 300 sets of notetags from my notes to the game itself, I've finally completed implementing all crafting recipes and the special effects for the weapons, armors, and items that needed them. Although there's some item creation in there, I wanted to nudge the system toward an upgrade system of sorts.

Most of the characters get 4 unique (and unsellable) weapons and armors, which can be upgraded up to 3 times after getting the Schematic with the same name. Each crafted upgrade gradually unlocks a set of secondary effects for it. For example, this is the progression of "Rosethorne", one of Leiko's later guns:

level +1 (lv0 equips have no effects, just stats)


level +2


level +3 :)

Most upgrades require an item called the Ascendant Star. I wanted them to be kind of like makeshift skill points, but for equipment. They will be sort of rare and meant to stop the player from overleveling their stuff too early, and to stop me from wasting any more time calculating crafting fees with some downright crazy formulas. The equipments' stats haven't been adjusted for balance yet; I just wanted to throw some values down in the database within a certain range.

Other than that, I've been trying to fix (or work around) some bugs and script incompatibilities. This can take a lot of time, especially when you feel increasingly isolated from everyone and too anxious to ask for help. ...Anyway, I found that the "Persistent Data" script was causing severe battle lag, so it's been removed. So, future versions of the game will no longer have the system settings automatically apply to all files, but I'd rather lose that than have 4 person battles run in single-digit FPS.