Pemkie Island · published
Welcome back to another monthly update for Pemkie Island! We have been incredibly busy behind the scenes overhauling core systems, polishing the visuals, and making sure the game feels both challenging and fair for what is gonna be a limited version of it.
We’re getting closer to our playtest, and we have a ton to share with you today! NB: A couple of GIFs were too heavy to add and would have been without audio, if you want to take a better look at the post, you can find it HERE
A while ago, we realized that dropping monsters at the end of a fight to obtain them felt way too random. What kind of monster catcher doesn't let you choose who to catch and when?
To fix this, we are currently working on a brand-new capture mechanic: The Taming Net.
Using the Taming Net will cost 0 AP first, and then increase by +1 AP for every use, resetting at the end of the encounter.
Once used, you must defeat the targeted Pemkie in the exact same turn to capture it!
If you miss, you can try again during the next planning phase at the increased cost, but you can only catch 1 Pemkie per encounter, so plan ahead who you would like to add to your team.
We’ve completely outgrown our basic "deal light/medium/heavy damage" skills. To give the game much deeper strategy, we’ve drafted a massive list of 180 total skills and items designed around different playstyles per each type.
For the playtest though, expect to see the first 42 implemented in-game!
To clarify how decks work now, here is a quick breakdown of the difference between Items and Skills:
Items are quick, strategic tools that activate instantly during your planning phase (right when you are assigning Skills to your Pemkies). These act as helpers for tricky situations!
For example, you can use a Snack to heal your Pemkie right away without risking a faint, or toss a Pebble to deal flat damage and perfectly prep a wild monster for capture.
Skills, on the other hand, are the core of your combat strategy and don't activate until the actual battle phase begins. This is where your tactical positioning, damage, and clever status effects come into play.
Note: We are also replacing a lot of text on these cards with easy-to-read icons and creating a massive batch of new VFX to make battles look way cooler!
We are making the path view much more fair. Previously, encounters, rests, and evo tiles spawned entirely at random, which meant a few bad rolls could leave you unable to rest or evolve early in a run. While we want to keep the roguelite randomness, we are building a set of rules for map generation.
We've added more rest and evo tiles to ensure players can get at least one of each.
We are working toward making these essential tiles unskippable at critical choke points (like right before a boss fight).
We will add and refine these rules quite a bit in the future, so you'll see this section again!
We added a brand-new pool generator for our encounters based on a Power Level system. Instead of simply swarming the player with a massive amount of small enemies on longer runs, their power level will naturally increase the more encounters are completed.
This means that as you progress deeper into a run, those swarms of weak monsters will be sometimes replaced by fewer, but significantly stronger enemies.
You will need to make sure you are actively growing your team's power to match this rising threat level, or you are going to be quickly defeated!
We finished our footstep system! The old VFX we had was based on movement delays and felt wacky.
Now, footsteps spawn exactly when your character hits the ground with dedicated sound effects for different terrains!
We currently have Grass, Sand, Water, and Wood fully working.
We are finally cleaning up the battle log! The old version was a messy wall of text and incomprehensible icons. We are stripping it down to a highly readable visual format: [Attacker Icon] + [Action/Damage] -> [Receiver Icon].
It is still a work in progress, but readability has already improved massively.
We'll share some screenshots once it's fully polished!
What is a Pemkie Island update without showing off some Pemkies?
This month, we're cheating a little bit. Instead of a brand-new creature, we gave a bit of love to some of our older models that were getting left behind. It's been exactly 2 years since we did those guys, it was very needed!
BEFORE
AFTER
Let us know what you think of their updated looks in the comments!
And last but not least, overhauling massive systems brings massive bugs, but we’ve been hard at work hunting them down:
Fixed game-breaking issues with certain status stacks.
Fixed a bug where statuses were deleting themselves when reapplied.
Fixed Infinite Enemy Mana! We noticed enemies were casting skills non-stop. Turns out they were strong enough that their mana was just stacking to infinity. This has been since fixed!
Next on our agenda is giving a unique passive ability to every single Pemkie currently in the game. We’ve implemented some of the simpler early-game passives, and now we are tackling the complex ones with all their related systems like permanent stat changes that transfer through evolution, or passives that trigger during specific battle phases. We are aiming to have all 41 passives implemented by the end of next month!
As announced on our Discord and socials, huge congratulations again to our contest winners: Shruppy and Topuppiary By Chef_Boyardee!
We will be moving on to modeling these cute little fellas very soon.
That’s all for this month, guys! A massive amount of work has been done, and there is still plenty ahead, but we are slowly and steadily approaching the playtest, so stay tuned!