Hello, all!

Today is going to be a bit of a quick update... to be honest, I don't want to bore everyone with a lot of minor details. But I figured we were overdue for an update on Astra Hunter Zosma.

How's It Going?

Over the past week or two, I managed to finish up just about everything with Chapter 3. As far as content goes, that means that the game is roughly halfway completed. It's a solid 3-4 hours of gameplay if you do both the main story and the continuous optional dungeon, so I'm figuring the overall runtime of this game will be about 6-8 hours when everything is said and done.

"But where is the Progress Chart?" you ask! Well, look no further:



As you can see, our friend the Progress Chart Lock failed to keep the Progress Chart in check, and a small bit had to be added to account for the game's finale. Technically, it's something I had planned but it was never really reflected on the chart. Nevertheless, the Lock has failed miserably and must spend the remainder of this game's development redeeming for his sins. What a pity.

There have been quite a few changes to the existing content, as well. The intro dungeon, for example, has gotten a bit of a makeover with a few additional story bits added that give better context on events that happen later in the game.



The tutorials have also been re-arranged a bit to account for the Shield/Barrier mechanic being removed completely. I ultimately made this decision because while it seemed to be a good idea at first, it just ended up being a frustrating waste of the player's actions to have to take an enemy's shield down before being able to damage it. It's one of the numerous changes I've made to the battle system in general to help speed it up and help prevent the player from being in combat for an overly long time. I like keeping things snappy! And I hope the combat system in the final game will be better and more balanced than what was seen in last year's demo. Considering the level of power creep in Zosma compared to past games, this has been quite the challenge!

Several other big changes have been made, such as the Treat system being completely overhauled. The old system affected the companion's stat growth. But you'd usually set it to the stats you wanted at the start of the game and never visit the menu again. Now the companion has a set stat growth rate, and you can continuously give treats to give them stat buffs for up to 3 battles at a time.

In general, making the companion character more useful is a long-term goal for this project. Right now they're just sorta "there" in combat. I'm hoping to figure that out sooner rather than later!

What's Next?

Well, I've started work on Chapter 4, which is something of this game's equivalent to Box World and Lamp Land seen in the Soma Spirits games. It's also the big kickoff for the second half of the game when the story really starts to ramp up. Here's a bit of a preview:



I hope you're feeling lucky! This dungeon will be sure to test your fortunes, so I hope you'll look forward to it.

I guess at this point it's time to keep chipping away at the rest of this project. I'm -hoping- it will be done sometime this year, but again, no promises on that front until I know for sure that I can reach that goal.

I guess that's it for today! Until next time.

- Sgt M