Hello hello hello! Some time has passed since our last update and we've been pretty quiet, but that's just because we've been 100% focused on improving the game and getting ready for launch! Thanks to the feedback we got last year from playtesters and demo players, we set our aim on improving how some of the mechanics work/synergize together, as well as making the core run flow tighter and more focused on the parts that matter the most: battles and build/skill crafting ;) We talked about some of these points in out last post, so let's get into the details:
Skill-crafting is one of the main hooks of the game, but because the system behind it is a bit complex, we were running into issues where some skills were not working really well with effects from runes attached to them, or even with other modifiers active on the casting character. Because our goal is to keep adding a lot of runes to the game with different/interesting effects, we spent some time reworking core parts of this system to make it much more robust, and to fix these cases of synergies not working as we wanted them. You can see an example of these improvements on the screenshots above: Before, the effects of the Punishment skill would not stack with Critical, or with other types of damage effects such as the fixed +5 damage from the rune; now everything stacks together as it should and it really opens up build experimentation (sky is the limit!).
The Victory UI flow has been completely revamped! Here's a summary of the changes:
This is a the big one for us! Before, equipping Runes was only possible via the Party Menu while outside of battle/events, but what we were seeing is a lot of people (ourselves included) would sometimes forget to equip the Runes or wouldn't even realize it was possible. Now, we have integrated Rune equipping directly into the rewards UI, and you can equip them as soon as you get them (or leave them for later if that's what you want). The new UI itself also shows all the skills from your party, so you don't have to be toggling between them when deciding where to place the Rune. As a result, the game loop has also become more focused, letting you jump right into the next encounter.
We've simplified this section to display all the relevant level up information (skill info + stat upgrades) at a glance, and to make it very easy to switch characters and compare between them.
Both the level up and the reward selection flows now have a shortcut to see the whole party summary with their learned skills and equipped runes, so you can easily check your current status and make the right choices.
Back when we started development on the game, we decided to worry about gamepad navigation/support later on (big mistake!). Since we added gamepad support last year, any new UI that we work on, including this overhaul, is being made with gamepad navigation in mind, so leveling up / choosing rewards / equipping runes should all be much more straightforward.
We've replaced the previous system of equipping one item per character at a time, to just have them all available in battle anytime! Similar to Runes, a lot of people were not equipping the Items and ended up never using them, but since they are now all accessible from a submenu in battle, it's now much easier to just use the right Item at the right occasion, much like how its done in traditional JRPGs. Each character can use one Item per turn, with a starting cost of 0 AP and increasing by 1 with each usage, until resetting back to 0 on the next turn. Keep an eye for Item related Artifacts, and even some modifiers like Encore that synergize with Items ;)
And last but not least, the big traversal changes! We've completely redesigned how traversal works in Trinity Archetype, shifting the focus from choosing between different paths in a map, to instead having a single path with multiple encounter options for each node. Adding to this is the character suggestion system: When presented multiple options, each character in your party will vote for the option they prefer, and a reward/bonus will be associated with that character suggestion. Certain characters will have a higher affinity with different encounter types (Yami likes battles a lot), as well as different bonuses (I hear that Worb likes to hoard Runes :D), so this is something you'll have to consider when selecting your party members. We feel this model suits the game much better, as encounter to encounter choice becomes more interesting/varied, and a bigger emphasis is put on how your next choice affects the build you got going on. Looking forward to push this change to the demo build soon!
All of these changes, EXCEPT for the Traversal changes, have made it to the latest demo build, so you can go try them out yourselves and let us know what you think! We're still making some tweaks/balancing to the new traversal system, but once that's done we'll also be including that in the demo build. Other smaller bug fixes + Rune and Artifact additions have also made it in, but as always we'll keep updating it as we get closer to release.
We're very excited as we get closer and closer to complete our pre-release roadmap! More details on that coming soon. As always, we're looking forward to your feedback, reach us here or on Discord.