I'm been getting a bit of work done for PotF over the last month, but not much of it has been tangible: graphical, balance, and plot work. The least of which is that couple of characters have been edited to actually be more interesting to look at.



Still not completely happy with them, but I'll be an old man before I can reliably make everything perfectly the way I want. Anyway, I want to talk about the dude at the bottom. Luke Frazier: the first permanent party member for Aeyr's campaign.

Luke is, well, a very different character from the rest of the cast in terms of both story and gameplay. When I designed him, there's one word that I wanted to keep at the core of his character: Backwards. For one: he might be the first main character that isn't totally miserable (at least visibly). He's bright, cheerful, and energetic; traits that I admittedly have trouble capturing well. This is in direct conflict with the obvious tragedy that occurs in the past that ended up implanting a magical relic inside his body, making him Infused. In the next release, there will be much more insight as to what the Infused are and how a Relic implanted in a body can give humans magic power.

Luke's battle style turns the traditional formula on its head in that he is very weak physically. To the point where, at the time of this writing, he doesn't get any Drives from weapons. To compensate, he focuses on magic attacks since, as an Infused, he can use magic without needing to equip a Relic. You know, because he already has a Relic equipped to him. Permanently.

However, one thing I noticed upon testing in battle: Luke absolutely demolishes everything. If an enemy has an elemental weakness, Luke can keep pumping that spell into the enemy and wipe it out before it even has a chance to react. And since his primary role in battle is a heavy damage dealer (you could say, a Luke Nuke! I'm sorry...) due to his spells, the rest of the party doesn't seem to have much purpose, which is a problem. Originally, I thought that such a strategy would be too heavy on his SP to be a viable tactic, but upon testing, I found this not to be the case. I tried balancing it by making Luke's magic cost 2 FTB points instead of one, but that just didn't seem fair, mostly because Luke's spells are the same as spells given to other party members via Relics, and that would seriously disrupt the game's balance.

So this prompted a quick and simple fix: Skill Lock.


Ignore the default looking battleback. It's just a visual placeholder while I focused on systems.

Now, just like Draw Weapon, each Drive and Burst Drive can only be used once per turn in battle. Sorry spammers, you're gonna have to work with the game's mechanics to beat enemies instead of relying on overpowered supermoves.

This system had an unintended side benefit as well: Now, I can revamp some skills to be more useful and/or elaborate. Before, with everyone being able to use any ability as many times as they wanted as long as they had the SP cost, there couldn't be any overpowered ability lest they overshadow all the others. Now, not only can we have more tiered abilities, but some Drives/Burst Drives can now slightly overlap others. Like maybe giving Aeyr an Earth elemental magic attack? That can happen now and players would actually use it.

Again though, this only affects a character's Drives and Burst Drives. Attacking, Focusing, and using items are not affected by this change.

That's all for now. I'm actually gonna go dark on the updates for a while, as I'm working on a super secret, super cool addition that I think you all are gonna love.