Dev Log #8

Howdy all! First and foremost thank you to everyone who played the unstable beta! I appreciate all the feedback & bug reports to help improve the general experience of the game. I’ve been working on the rest of the content for 1.0.4, the first stable patch while I work on content for 1.1.0 to avoid burnout, so I have quite a bit to show today! 

This will cover about half of the content for the 1.1 major content update, so stay tuned for the next developer log at a later date!

(Note: You may want to skip this part if you don’t care about balancing/damage calculations)

 Equipment and abilities have undergone large changes for 1.1.0! Items now have general defensive stats, on top of the normal elemental resistances. As such, the elemental damage modifiers of equipment & abilities have heavily decreased. Meaning that both the player & enemies will have less variance in damage taken/received due to elemental damage alone.

 You will see a lot of the stats for your equipment have changed as item balance is adjusted around the decreased importance of elemental modifiers.

The three new stats are: Magic Attack, Physical Defense, and Magical Defense. Both damage and resistances have been split up between the two types for each, respectively. For example, a sorcerer’s abilities (and ideal equipment) will now scale with their MATK stat rather than the generic ATK stat. 

The player’s damage type will primarily be determined by your class. Gunslingers and Sentinels benefit the most from higher attack, whereas Sorcerers and Voodoo users will benefit a lot more from magical attack! 

Depending on what type of attack a player or enemy is using, their damage will either collide against the target’s DEF or M. Def. For example, an enemy forcing you to drink from a hose might use physical Liquid damage, whereas an enemy channeling water at you via magical means will use magical Liquid damage.

The elemental modifier against resistances is the same, but the defense stat it clashes with will be different! (If this is confusing, think of being attacked with a flaming sword vs a fireball in a normal RPG!)

Another noteworthy stat change is the addition of Luck! Luck will directly affect the drop rates of different items from foes, but it has a hard cap. Two “lucky” items of different item levels can grant the same amount of luck (for example, a Lvl. 10 lucky item & a Lvl. 1 lucky item might both give 8 Luck).

The first major addition in update 1.1.0 is player housing! The player will have access to TWO different player houses to start with. One being the small one room house in Greeha Village, and a second large manor outside of Greeha Village! The larger house features a fully decoratable front yard, as well as multiple different interior rooms to decorate. 

For player housing, the player has access to ~45 different objects from the normal housing decoration to use for their housing, with items divided into the following categories: wall decorations, tabletops, interior, and exterior floor decorations! 

Every object in the photo below, except for the windows and large table, are fully craftable and placeable!

I plan on adding more gimmicky inflation-related items before the update releases, or soon after. Items are push and pullable, so you can decorate exactly how you want your house to be!

Your gear in 1.1 will be fully enchantable! You can finally put those hard earned scraps to use augmenting your equipment! Enchantment runes can be crafted by fusing different types of scraps with etched runes. These runes can be crafted from pixie dust and uncut rubies!

Enchantments can bolster stats such as your ATK, MATK, Speed, Capacity, DEF, etc. Offensive enchantments can be infused into your main & off-handed equipment, whereas defensive enchantments can be infused into your defensive accessories! Different enemy types will now drop unique types of scraps.

The first of the three class reworks is the sorcerer! Sorcerers now make use of the powerful Magi Board, a magic circle capable of holding three powerful arcane runes. Depending on what normal abilities you use, the next empty slot in your magi board will fill with the corresponding rune. When the player has stacked three runes, filling the magi board, they will gain access to the sorcerer’s most powerful spell, Judicium.

Judicium is a high damaging ability that has additional properties depending on what three runes it is cast in combination with. Some examples of rune effects on the spell include: +20% damage, granting mana recovery to the user, gaining damage equal to 10% of the player’s current mana, etc.

When Skill Trees are implemented, you will be able to specialize and bolster the power of specific runes for sorcerers, as well as the entire magi circle itself! This will include things like being able to wipe runes off the board to power up your next cast of Judicium, allowing it to be cast with only two runes slotted, etc.

Gunslinger is unique in that it functions off of CRAFTED BULLETS to execute effects! Much of the work for gunslinger is done before the fight begins! Depending on the element of your blowgun, the normal darts fired will correspond to the element of your blowgun! If you match a shot type to the element of your blowgun, the shot will be empowered to do bonus damage!

The primary class function of gunslinger is the Pressure Gauge! Gunslinger shots have an innate ability to critically strike, starting at a miniscule % chance with each shot. With each shot, the crit rate increases until you land a crit. When landing a crit as gunslinger, the damage and effect of your shots is DRAMATICALLY AMPLIFIED, and the pressure gauge resets back to 0, minimizing your crit chance once more until the gauge is boosted back up.  Depending on which blowgun you have, your gun will have an additional effect. Some blowguns have Precision Shot, a passive that makes every fifth shot from your gun ignore enemy resistances! Other guns will have access to Quick Load, a passive that makes every fifth shot from your gun fire two darts, rather than one! Which type of passive your blowgun has can be viewed from the description of the weapon!

Sentinels are a tanky class that excel in resisting physical inflation and buffing themselves and the party as fights go on! Sentinels different basic abilities open their chakra, which are the latent power found within the body of every person, that are only able to be harnessed through discipline and training! Chakra grant buffs, and each have a unique effect associated with them. When skill trees are added, you will be able to customize the strength allocated to each chakra type depending on your playstyle!

The effects of the different chakra are as follows:

•  (Head) CONTROL CHARKA- Grants a specialized puffkiss ability, allowing them to spread the buffs from their chakra to their allies! Also grants resistance to the BLOCKED status.
• (Chest) ENDURING CHAKRA- Grants a stamina buff. Unlocks additional forms of meditation to easily recover stamina.
  
• (Right Arm) STRIKING CHAKRA - Grants an attack buff. Unlocks additional damaging abilities when opened.
• (Left Arm) SWIFT CHAKRA- Grants a speed buff. Also provides immunity to slowing and ensnaring statuses.
• (Belly) RESILIENT CHAKRA- Greatly increases DEF stat. Also grants access to guarding abilities to dramatically lower incoming physical damage for a turn.

Sentinels are unique in that they can continue to cast abilities even without stamina! The downside to this is that allowing your stamina to become completely empty will cause all your chakra to close at once. It is important to properly manage your stamina expenditure in fights in order to ensure you don't meet an embarrassingly explosive end in combat! 

The general rotation of a sentinel will revolve around managing your chakra, stamina, and spreading your buffs to your allies. Be careful though, when puffkissing your allies you will pass some of your own size onto them! How... kind of you? 

As decided by the poll in the discord server, the new class to be added in 1.1.0 is the voodoo class! This class revolves around the use of hexes and poppets to pop your foes! (And allies, if you're cruel enough...) 

Hexes: Practitioners of voodoo magic wield powerful hexes against their foes, used to decrease the base stats of their targets! As such, voodoo users rarely directly inflate their foes. Instead, they simply prepare them for an explosive suprise!

 Poppets: The bread and butter of voodoo magic is the use of poppets! In combat, voodooists can pluck material off of an opponent (or an ally, but what did Ariana ever do to you!?), to link them to their poppet. Once linked, the voodooist can inflate the poppet to inflate their foes from afar! This comes with the added bonus that inflating a target via a poppet completely ignores their magical defense! 

If you choose to, you can link your poppet to your allies and blow them up have the poppet hold different items to give an indefinite buff as long combat endures! Additionally, for each poppet you blow apart (friend or foe) you will gain a stack of WITCHERY! 

Witchery: When you amass three stacks of Witchery! (which carry over across different fights), you will gain the ability to either massively cut a foes stats for three turns, leaving them a completely useless parade float (how embarrassing, yikes!), or render an ally completely immune to popping for two turns! Who said there weren't ever any merits to keeping these ill intentioned tricksters around!?

Have you wanted to support the game’s development, and earn some sweet rewards while doing so!? Well soon you can! When 1.0.4 launches in about a week, I will be launching a Subscribestar subscription to support development. 

There will be two tiers, one just for early access to future updates, and one with some extra goodies such as exclusive votes for future content, more frequent content previews, community directed questlines, frequent WIP builds, and more! 

I’ll post a more detailed devlog on that when 1.0.4 is released! A build with about half the content for 1.1.0 will launch on Subscribestar along-side 1.0.4 when it is made public! Until then, thank you for your support and taking the time to read this developer log! <3

Try the unstable beta here:

verblimp.itch.io/swelladia

Join the Discord for more active updates and to potentially influence development:

discord.gg/wwHqZGNxKR

If you're feeling generous considering supporting the game on Ko-Fi!

ko-fi.com/verblimp