It's been so long since last update that you might have forgotten about this. No offense taken. Just don't forget again. Think about Automon Arena daily from now on.
ALL Automons have sprites now. Some even got pretty major redesigns. Magmelt here is still burning in the afterlife
Remember that circular world map? You can forget it, because it looks like this now. Like an actual continent, with areas color-coded by difficulty. Still sticking to basic shapes though.
(Had to crunch the hell out of this gif to let Steam upload it)
Wild areas can now have NPCs in them. Well, one NPC for now. It's Barry Jitters. That son of an Angrus. NPCs have a type preference, can benefit from type bonuses, will rearrange their team to counter yours (somewhat) but their Automons also reward a bit more experience. If you beat an NPC, they'll still be in the area, but with no Automons. They will get a new team 5 turns later
Some areas are now "gyms" for a lack of better word, where you can fight bosses. If you beat them, you get a badge of their type, which boosts the type bonus of that type by 1. Everything said about NPCs also applies to bosses, except they don't disappear for a 5-turn vacation
Quite a few Automon reworks. A bunch got a new ability. Two of them even changed types!
Added music from the original Automon. I can't show this through a gif though, so here's the new "evolution" animation instead
Added shinies because of course I would spend time on that
Remember how I said that I plan to release in Early Access in August? Well, that was obviously a joke! And you fell for it!
Nah but honestly, I thought that there's no point in just sending the game into space to die when Next Fest is around the corner. I'll throw a demo out there for the festival and see how things go (or don't go).
No matter how it goes, I will update this game until it's the next Minecraft (or at least the next Artifact)
Next up on the big to-do:
Add some non-combat areas that do simple things like healing, trading Automons with NPCs, fast travel to another point on the map, but also absurd things like change the ability of an Automon, recruit a terrorist to attack another player, blend 3 Automons of the same type into a badge
Items! This is obvious since it was in the original Automon. BUT HOWEVER: there are some things I don't like about how items worked there so I'll try a system that doesn't require excessive fiddling and doesn't have the "what if I need it later" syndrome
Ok, that's it. You can go back to whatever you were doing before (probably playing a better game)