The Eclipse Breaker team and I have been working hard and kicking ass and I'm excited to announce that our new demo is up, featuring everything you've seen in these posts and more. Since the last time the game was publicly available there have been new enemies, the Companion system, a new training grid update, new Prima, new player abilities, it basically feels like a whole new game. To play, just head over to the store page and click "Download".
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2815060/Eclipse_Breaker/
If you're not at a computer right now, here's a video of me playing the game and talking about all the new features:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU0teUL1u6E
When you're done, you can come back here and continue to read about all the new things we've developed that you'll see in upcoming builds of Eclipse Breaker. Take your time, I'll wait. And after you play, don't forget to send in some feedback. I love feedback, and I count over 50 changes and fixes to the game so far based on feedback from players, so keep sending it!
OK, welcome back! I hope you enjoyed the demo. Let's talk about a new enemy, the Slag. He's a mound of elemental goo that spews hazardous puddles at you. He wears a cute hat and comes in every elemental variety. You'll encounter Fire Slags when you're in a fire level, which spew fire puddles that will ignite you, Water Slags on the water level that spew water puddles that will drench you, Ice Slags that will freeze you, Lightning Slags that will shock you, and Earth Slags that create earthquake zones that damage you more if you stand in the center.
We're in the beginning phases of adding a story to the game, and characters that you talk to. As part of this process we have been creating new character portraits. You already know Ember, the game's protagonist, our stalwart hero who is determined to kill the sun god and doesn't get it when the kids talk about those newfangled Constellation Grids. I'd also like you to meet Sylphie, the keeper of the Temple of the Gate. She maintains the temple and its shop, and likes to see how many times she can snooze her alarm before she absolutely has to get up. Props to the illustrator Devin Yang for making these, he does amazing work.
And finally, one of the most long-requested features has finally gotten some work put into it: the ability to save your game! It's a small thing, but as we add a ton of new content it's important that players are able to pick up where they left off. And I'll let you in on a tiny spoiler - the first time you run the game the save game feature will also double as a narrative beat, as you'll be "loading" a save game from your 1997 PS1 save cartridge. I put in a lot of work to make it feel like that legacy JRPG loading screen that you may remember. Details like this aren't strictly necessary, but they help a lot to make that right vibe.
I'm probably most excited about the new narrative we're building for this game. It's the last big piece that we need to make this really start feeling like the old JRPG vibe that we're going for, and we have some cool things in the pipeline there. I don't want to talk publicly about it yet, but if you're interested in our narrative plans, I'm more amenable to talking about that sort of thing on our Discord server.