I was kinda bummed I couldn't find a team for the McBacon Jam. So to make up for my lack of participation, I decided to go ham on PotF and spend as much time as I would if I were on a jam. The end result is that a lot of ground was covered in both planned and unplanned areas. There's too much to cover in one blog, so I'll just focus on the most important one:

On a whim, I decided to jack up the levels of all the party members to about 30, then 60 (the planned levels by the end of the game) and did some random testing against stronger enemies. After overhauling all the stats for this last release, I wondered how that would affect mid to late game. Well, it's a good thing I did, because I uncovered a rather serious flaw in the SP mechanics: Once you get enough of it, you can fire off strong abilities like it's nobody's business, and the window of vulnerability left from low SP is negligible at best.

The intent of Stamina's inclusion into defense was to discourage spamming your strongest moves for fear of leaving yourself vulnerable to further damage. With basic attacks costing a mere 1 SP and most early game Drives and Burst Drives costing single digit SP costs, the game quickly became unbalanced as your levels rose higher and character's SP touched the 20s and even 30s. Something had to change.

So here is that change: All SP costs will now cost a small hard base plus a % of a character's Max SP. Let's look at Aeyr around the time he reaches the end of his prologue:



As you can see, these two Drives cost a little more than they do in the current demo. Sonic Fist costs 2 + 30% of Aeyr's max SP,and Heavenfall costs 3 + 35% of max SP. Stronger skills, such as magic, will take about 40% -50% plus one or two extra points of SP. Basic attacks will cost a straight 10% or 15% max SP with no added flat rates.

Since I wanted to shy away from more powerful versions of previous skills for the sake of variety, this change did a great job of keeping your early game skills useful while still forcing you to think about how vulnerable you'll leave allies after attacking. Later, when the damage output of enemies gets higher and higher, the lost SP will gain more and more meaning.

Well, that's all well and good, except for the fact that that one small change completely upsets the balance of the game. Foes were running out of SP way too often and started spending every other turn Focusing. If they weren't doing that, they would demolish allies because of how vulnerable they were thanks to all the SP spent attacking. When players are working with rather small numbers at the beginning of the game, single digit changes to SP here and there meant a rather large difference.

Essentially, this is what happened to the game after making this change and my reaction to it:



But hey, that's fine! In fact, this actually led to some much needed balance tweaks to make battles more fair. These tweaks have been a long time coming and, after running through the whole thing, make the game feel a lot more dynamic; Opportunities arise after foes use strong attacks that drain a large portion of their stamina, and tougher enemies no longer required multiple turns to chip away at their SP before inflicting damage. There have been quite a few compensations, but here are the two big ones:

- Every party member's initial HP and SP have been boosted, and they will gain more of each upon level up. Originally, characters used to gain on average 1 SP every level or two, but now they should gain at least 1 SP every level up, maybe sometimes even 2.

- Enemies will now regenerate 20% of their total SP each turn just like allies do. It always bothered me that foes didn't follow the same rules as allies, and now, with this change, the action has more of a flow to it as both sides can continue to launch offensive and defensive moves for a longer period of time before stopping to focus, maintaining a more consistent pace to battles.

So after playing through the game with these and many other adjustments, I realized that the game is now quite a bit easier. Thanks to the boost in HP and SP, there's more room for error while you're learning the mechanics. And you know something? I'm okay with that. I realized while watching someone play PotF in front of me that there just wasn't enough time spent with new players to get them adjusted to the mechanics before ramping up the difficulty. I thought I did a decent job with the beginning, but that turned out to be false.

There has been plenty of other changes as well, both inside and outside the battle system itself. I'm thinking about updating the demo to reflect these new changes once I playtest the entire prologue again to make sure everything works just right. However, I'm rather hesitant to do this because I'm also thinking about overhauling the database to reorganize items on the list. I misjudged the amount of spaces for equipment and skills I needed, and the only way to get it back on track is to revamp the database entirely. If I do that, however, your save files will no longer be transferable between versions. Yet at the same time, I don't want this page to go without a download for long.

Anyway, that's the big game-changer. Thanks so much for reading!