Well this was a bit of a miscalculation. I was hoping to make this announcement a big surprise, but then I had to go and ask for feedback and help in the screenshot thread. Since it's pretty obvious now, I might as well make it official: that super secret super cool addition I mentioned at the end of the last blog is that I'm gonna be making custom tiles for Prayer of the Faithless.

Why did I decide to do this? Well, I think it's the same reason why my mapping is rather bland: the RTP just isn't inspiring to me. Sure, you can create interesting maps with RTP, but it all strikes me as generic and impersonal. If I wanted to tell the story of this game visually and take better advantage of the medium, moving on is the only solution. Now that I can create what I want to, I've found all sorts of ways to tell the story and build the world of PotF without resorting to dialogue.

Here are a few examples, still WIPs, but it should give you an idea of what I'm talking about:



So yay! The game's getting a new tileset! ... Can you all at least pretend to be surprised? For me? Please?

But wait, there's more! The new visuals aren't limited to the tilesets! Thanks the hard work of a certain unity, the battles are getting an overhaul as well!



You have unity to thank for the battle visuals. She made the battlebacks as well as offered to draw the enemies! I think she did a fantastic job on these, Thanks so much, unity!!

So here's the big question: How far will these new assets set me back? Well, the good news is that it won't be THAT bad. At the time this blog has gone live, I'm done with tiles for Asala, the Brecellian Darkwood, and some of the buildings of Honelleth, which accounts for about 50% of the tiles I need to include in the prologue. Originally, I just wanted to remake the RTP tilesets, but then I realized that there's really no need for that. The entire reason why I'm doing this is to break away from the RTP and be able to tell the story of PotF with imagery as well as with dialogue, and simply tracing the RTP tiles defeats the entire purpose of making custom stuff.

I'm currently on winter break from school, and I plan to take this time to finish the new assets for the prologue. I start school on January 11th, and I aim to have the new prologue out by then. As the available demo is still the RTP version, I'm keep the official screenshots as they are until the new assets are ready. In fact, I'm on the fence about just pulling the demo since it's about to become incredibly outdated. If you want to pick it up, now's the time to do it before I decide to take it down.

So that's where we stand as of now. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to off into hiding because I know that second paragraph is going to cause Liberty to hunt me down and murder me.

So the prologue is over and the two main characters will now undertake their own separate journeys. I'm super excited to be finally working on the main story after all this time setting up the gameplay structure. No more buildups, no more (lengthy) exposition. Now it's time for the cast to move in and do their thing.

Admittedly, I haven't done much work on the game itself, at least in the editor. Instead, effort was put into reorganizing and restructuring the plot and design of the two main campaigns. Now that a firm beginning, middle, and end for each story has been laid out, it's time to implement this design.


Yeah, new heads for Aeyr's and Luke's sprite. I'm blind and completely missed the fact that Luke's sprite head looks nothing like his portrait head, and Aeyr's original hair just looked awful.

Aeyr has got quite a bit of pain to work through. After being betrayed and now on the run from the very military he was once a part of, he isn't really sure what to do. For the time being, he's made it his mission to find Mia, the one person in the whole world he can trust now. Mia, for her part, is struggling with surviving after her village is destroyed. She's one of the villagers who managed to escape before the attack, and is now trying to find a new home. However, the Deep Fog has expanded to the point where it cuts them off from Asala's safety. So they have no choice but to march around the world if they want to ever see home again.

Sorry, no screenshot of a cutscene in Mia's story since I haven't gotten started on it yet. I can show you this though:


Different windowskin color for different campaign. Also, poor Amalie.

Since it's been given away now, I might as well just say it: Luke joins with Aeyr, while Amalie catches up to Mia and they travel together. I'll talk a bit more about Luke in the next blog, since this is getting lengthy already. As for who fills in the third slot for each party, that's still a seeeeeecret!

Anyway, the two stories are more than just two different perspectives on the world. Each campaign is planned to have distinct feels to them, so they don't feel like playing the same game again. Aeyr's story is planned to have a more action-y, Devil May Cry inspired feel, where you have to deal with larger groups of enemies. Mia's story, on the other hand, is designed to feel more like the suspenseful, survival horror style Soul Sunder went for. Meaning that, compared to Aeyr at least, you'll fight fewer enemies, but each one is significantly more powerful than a common enemy.

These two different feels are only possible because of one key difference: Aeyr's Soulfire Restoration. Now, Aeyr is capable of restoring HP of any party member without the use of items. As such, his party can afford to take a LOT more punishment from enemies.

... I just realized how dumb that last statement must sound to newcomers. "Nova, of COURSE RPG characters have skills that heal!" Well, I'm not used to it, okay? So this is gonna be interesting to balance.

Anyway, time to get back to work. I hope I'm not boring you with a bunch of talk you don't care about! Is there anything in particular you want to read more on? You wanna know more about the supporting cast? A deeper look into the battle mechanics? Any questions you have about the campaign differences? Or do you think I talk too much and would rather leave elements like this a surprise? I'm all ears.

For the past week and a half since the prologue's release, I've been slaving away for unity testing the entirety of Luxaren Allure. In between playtesting sessions and the joys of real life responsibilities, not much has been going on in terms of content creation, unfortunately. Despite this, I've got a lot to talk about in terms of the overall game structure and plans. The first and largest point on the list being the differences in campaigns. I'm drafting a longer blog post detailing this stuff, but the reason I'm writing this now is because I'd like to ask for your opinions on the game.

I'm super curious as to the prologue's general reception. Being a first release, I'm sure there's plenty of stuff that could be improved, and I'm certainly glad to do that! Though I'd be happy with just an overall opinion of the game. Without any kind of feedback, I'm left wondering if something's gone horribly wrong or if something worked well and to enforce that further.

If you don't mind, here's a short list of questions. No need to answer all of them, as they're just there to provoke some thought:

1. What did you think of the game overall?
2. Which character(s) did you find most/least interesting and why?
3. What are your impressions (or lack of) of the two protagonists (Aeyr and Mia)?
4. Was the battle system interesting to you? Did it make you think beyond just "mash attack to win"? What equipment loadout did you use (not just what you got from the Quartermaster)?
5. What DIDN'T you like about the story, gameplay, or whatever else? Anything I could fix?
6. Any other thoughts? Don't feel shy about sharing your opinion!

Thanks so much in advance!

Since I started school two months ago, progress on this game has dropped to a pathetically slow pace. I had wanted to get the prologue out before I started, but that just wasn't going to happen. I've been working on this in what little spare time I have nowadays, but don't expect rapid updates anymore.

Good news, though: I'm about 90% done with the prologue! All I have to do is write out a cutscene, then the boss fight, then the ending cutscene, and then the core of the prologue is complete! Then all I have to do is add more NPCs, make some tweaks to the battles, run some bug tests, update the character art, pick out some music, edit the dialogue, run through the prologue myself again... tweak the equipment again... Get eviscerated by beta testers...

*sigh*

Anyway, while I don't want to commit to a hard date yet, I think I'll have the prologue ready for public consumption sometime soon. One thing I can say with certainty is that it will be out this month. I'm really sorry to keep you waiting for the prologue. Believe me: I did not expect it to take as long as it has.

But enough whining. No one wants to read my whining. Although it's fun to whine.


While there are no official classes in PotF, a character's equipment loadout is designed to be something akin to a subclass. Adding in an official class changing system would be a bit too rigid, so instead, players will be given a healthy amount of weapons, armors, and relics, and it'll be up to them to pick and choose who gets what given each character's stats and innate abilities.

Equipment has three major functions: Altering stats, applying bonus effects, and enables Drives if said equipment is a weapon or offhand item. Some gear leans more towards one category than the others, but that's the general idea.

Let's use Amalie as our test subject since she's the most standard party member in the prologue. (Aeyr doesn't have his power yet and Mia breaks the normal routine in character building) Amalie, unaltered by any equipment, should play similarly to a Final Fantasy Paladin. At the start, she comes with a mix of aggro moves and state restoration abilities. This is her starting equipment loadout:



Here's the catch: She is a Manna, and Manna are typically weaker than a standard human. This means that her Attack and Guard stats will be below average compared to others at her level. After you gain a healthy amount of equipment, you'll have a number of options to get around this problem. Here are a few examples:

1: Turn her into a Sentinel by boosting her defense.



So we've equipped her with medium armor and swapped her shield to a heavier one. The Helmet prevents Head Injuries, so she'll always be able to use her aggro and defense abilities. The Drives that come with the shield enables her to stagger the enemy, leaving them open to further damage, and go into a counter stance, which prevents her from taking any more actions that turn, but nearly guarantees a counter if physically attacked. Plus, her Guard stat has jumped up, so now she won't have to worry about using too many abilities to leave her with less SP and consequentially, more open to damage.

However, note the drop in max SP. There's much less flexibility in what she can do in combat. She can't attack or use her abilities as often as she could otherwise. This is because she's been loaded down with medium class armor, which takes off a percentage of your max SP.

So the result is Amalie becomes more of a hands off character than she was originally. Less SP and actions to perform, but a more solid Guard stat that can't drop no matter how low your SP goes. If you prefer a more offensive, high risk/high reward style approach, you can...

2: Turn her into a Duelist by boosting her counter attack rate.



This loadout makes Amalie much lighter on her feet than the other one. The Rally Drive she gets from the sabre enables one ally to perform a critical attack on their next action. Her Target Shield and Guerilla Boots combine to give her a constant 30% counter attack rate, which nullifies damage to Amalie and hitting the enemy for a boosted damage value unaffected by their SP.

To tweak it further, you could swap that Sabre with the Swordbreaker, losing a Drive and a bonus to her Magic stat, but boosting your counter rate even further, or Ruhiel, which inflicts Bleed (losing HP every turn) on a target. However, Amalie has one of very rare magic attacks of all the party members have. And if you're fighting a crowd of enemies with high SP, you'll lose the chance to do some preemptive damage.
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Hopefully it's more clear now how much more of a difference equipment makes than levels. This was actually more detail than I had intended (why bother playing the game when I'm pretty much talking about it all right now?), and so now I'm going to go into my little hole and get back to work on finishing this prologue. Next time you hear from me, it'll be announcing that it's out and ready for public consumption!

Let me tell you a story about friendship, coexistence, and forced assimilation: Yanfly's Target Info script refused to play nice with the Luna Engine for the longest time. If you tried to use it, battles would lock into an infinite loop, effectively freezing the game and forcing you to restart. I don't know what the deal was between them. Maybe the Luna Engine broke Target Info's favorite toy when they were kids and was never quite forgiven. Regardless, Target Info was just determined to be a disruptive child, and so was put on the sidelines while NeonBlack's Enemy Scan script was used as a substitute.

Unfortunately, while NeonBlack's script does some cool things that Yanfly's does not, it did not have my favorite feature: comparing the actor's stats to enemy's during battle. And so, with my recent interest in delving into and messing around with scripts, I decided to drag Target Info out of retirement to undergo some... "persuasive therapy".

And it worked. Yanfly's Target Info script is not only working perfectly with the Luna Engine, but the, uh, "therapy" went so well, Target Info decided to apologize to Luna by showing off more info that it hadn't originally:


See? Now you can view HP and SP in addition to the four main stats on the Parameters page! Woohoo!

Okay, dry humor aside, I wish I could put into words how happy this makes me. Being able to see the enemy's stats and weaknesses/resistances was one of my favorite things about Soul Sunder's battles, and even in RPGs in general. Without it, players wouldn't have as much information conveyed to them, and battles would become more of a guessing game of finding the enemy's weakness. If you died, it would be hard to justify the cause of death, and you could end up feeling cheated. No longer!


This would normally be a good segue into talking about the battle system. Hell, I've already written down what I want to say about it. Plus, since it was requested, I feel back for not talking about it. However, there's a couple of announcements I want to make that are pretty important.

1: That August 17th date I set before just isn't going to happen for the whole prologue. I underestimated the amount of work I had left to do, and I'd rather wait to give you guys a quality product than a rush job. I've gotten about 80% of the cutscenes done and all the battles done except for the end of the Prologue, but that's just the barebones. I haven barely touched most of the extra stuff (NPCs, extra maps, etc.) and I wanted to get those done. Sorry! But you'll have to wait a little bit longer for the prologue.

2: Well, okay. How much longer? Well... Good question. For those that aren't aware, I'm participating in the second McBacon Jam! Which means I'll be tied up for the next few weeks while I work on that game. I would say I'm sorry but... have you seen team I'm on? I'm working with unity, Luchino, and JosephSeraph. All wonderfully creative people! Sorry, but I'm really not sorry. So instead of a prologue to a game, I'll work with others to give you a WHOLE, COMPLETE game. That should make up for the lack of activity here, right?I know any of you would have jumped at the chance to work with them, so you can't blame me for this, right? ... right?

Wait... what are you doing with those torches and pitchforks?