The Seven Seals

Hi all! Lots to talk about with this update, first being the title of this blog.

Yes, Chapter Two's release is in sight, but it's going to take more time than I initially planned. I was hoping to send the game to testers right around this time, but it's just not quite there yet. I wound up making a lot of improvements to Chapter One that delayed my work on Chapter Two by a bit. However, this is a good thing because it means that Chapter One is much more polished and enjoyable now.

With Chapter Two, I'm about to make my first test playthrough, which means that things are set and playable, but there might still be bugs, grammar errors, or other issues that I've missed. Eagle-eyed subscribers might have noticed the addition of a walkthrough for Chapter Two on the appropriate page, but it's still lacking some information like recommended levels, which is one of things I determine through my initial playthroughs. Don't look unless you want spoilers!

I hope to be done with this soon, but there are some complications. March is an extremely busy month at my workplace with a lot of travel and weird hours. This means more time in planes and cars, which means I can do more work than I usually can, but this also means I'm going to be worn out and jet-lagged, which means less motivation and different priorities. Worst-case scenario, you'll see a release by the end of March. Hopefully, I can do better than that, but I don't want to promise something I can't deliver on.

Onto other items, you might have noticed that the Classes page briefly vanished over the course of the last week. It's back up now with the new class cards in place, but I'm still revising the information on the page itself.

Speaking of new class cards, we have new class cards! They look pretty good, I think. I took inspiration from FF5 for the layout and information and they communicate the essentials well enough.

On the subject of the classes themselves, some of them have undergone slight revisions in order to make them all more viable. When I say slight, I mean slight. Like adjusting attack by two points or switching a skill learned at level 5 with a skill learned at level 6. Honestly, the average player probably won't even notice a difference, but it's still worth noting.

I've also made a decision that streamlined Chapter Two and should make future chapters easier: I've copied and pasted enemy statistics from Chapter One. To be clear: I have not copy-pasted the enemies themselves, but I am using the numbers I used for them with these new enemies.

For example, the Chomper enemy in Chapter One had 81 HP and 40 ATK; the Tundra Mole enemy in Chapter Two also has those same statistics, but different appearance, weaknesses, and abilities.

Going through a fresh round of balancing and tweaking wasn't fun for me and I realized that, if the stats aren't broken, I shouldn't try and fix them. This also is nice for the player, because enemies in Chapter Two will scale in a way they're familiar with and HP, damage, and other factors will remain essentially the same.

Finally, I've moved over to a two-week update schedule because of the aforementioned travel and because I have a little less free time now in general. I'll switch back to weekly updates when there's enough happening to justify them.

I think that's all for now! Thanks again for supporting this game.