Hello!

I'm excited to announce I've released a new demo of Starless Umbra.

New Features

An additional 90 minutes of gameplay with minigames, dungeons, additional story content, and a village segment to complete the vertical slice.

Gamepad and couch co-op support. Play with a friend! I have no idea if this is fun.

Smarter AI! Players won't just stand in poison and take damage anymore. As an aside, this added some really interesting emergent behavior. Enemies might move out of the poison, but if you use knockbacks you can bully them back in for a deadly combo.

More interfaces. Shops/Item Trading, settings screens, and tweaks to the existing menu screens to keep things as friendly as possible.

A Note on Bugfixing and Polish

I did spend several weeks tidying up the existing content, but I've gotten to a point where there's diminishing returns. I'd like to think this is more polished than the last demo, but there's still tons I can do here. I don't want to let this detract too much from adding new content, so for now this feels like a good checkpoint. If you encounter any issues or have any suggestions I'll certainly document them.

Challenging Myself

It's no secret games like Xenoblade Chronicles and FF7:Remake shaped SU's battle system. With that comes the challenge of balancing a myriad of systems I hadn't really considered with traditional turn-based gameplay. I deliberately do not have healing items to stockpile. Instead, you heal between battles. This came with great difficulty (hah) as tweaking enemies to make gameplay challenging is an ongoing, tedious process.

Additionally, cooldown management is a big part of enemy encounters (cooldown state and status effects persist between battles) so I'm designing in this gray area for me where I don't want this to be purely action-based (I love my stats) but then there is some dexterity involved so you're not just spamming skills and standing in place. That said, difficulty is subjective. I wanted battles to be engaging/challenging but it could be frustrating to some players. I made jumping back into the game pretty quick, with an option to drop down the enemy stats if you find yourself dying repeatedly.

Anyway, I'd love to know what you think. Please enjoy the demo!