My productivity has spiked lately, mostly going HAM on filling database entries and notetags. So here's what's been done over the past few weeks:

1) I've completed the majority of each party member's unique skillsets (Tools, Gunplay, etc). While testing them, I've noticed that the battles have been running much faster too. On my laptop, showing damage numbers during an animation hasn't slowed down the game lately. Not sure why it's happening, but hell, I'll take it! :D

2) Converted some in-game tutorials to images so that they're easier to understand and remember. Example screenshots will be posted soon.

3) Purge skills have been revised to be more useful and available, so that you don't have party members unable to do anything with 100 Tension most of the time. Starting in future releases, Purges will be split into two types with different icons. Here's a sample of Altair's new Purges in testplay. His purges focus on damage and healing.


(Bright Storm does low elec damage, but is tripled against undead; Radiance heals the party to full)

Purges with yellow icons can be used without being in Chain Bonus mode. Purges with the red icon can be used only during CB mode. My current plan is to have each character learn up to 4 Purges. Each character will start with 1 yellow Purge, and new ones will be learned over the course of the story. (So, Moshi will start with a self-heal, and Leiko gets an Attack & Agility buff.)

4) I'm still rebuilding a separate project file called "Catharsis Map Plans", used to create the base layers of parallaxes, and planning the tilesets that will be used in the actual game. The older version was lost when I had to reformat my computer a couple of months ago.
To speed up development, I've decided to go back to tileset mapping for some places, mostly outdoor/nature areas, and dungeons. But if a map will end up needing too many events for layering, I'll parallax it instead. Houses and shops will be more likely to be parallaxed, because I just love doing those haha

5) While working on CMP, I had a neat little idea with the windows. Now, when it's nighttime in towns, some streetlights and windows will be lit up. And inside of a building, the windows will be dark or have a night sky with stars in them. This old Misthaven Cliffs test screenshot is the basic idea, but window edits were not made until a while later:



During the day, those streetlights will not be lit, so the gaslight wouldn't be there either. My inspiration was from other rpgs with time-of-day systems, but I have no plans on implementing one in this game. The time of day will change automatically with the narration. In any case, I thought it'd be a neat little detail. :)

That's about it for this update. Thanks for reading, and happy early new year!

(by the way, if you enjoyed the demo released earlier this summer, please consider nominating/voting for it for the misaos! your vote will be going to a game that is still regularly being worked on!)