So we are extremely busy and a lot more organized than we have ever been. We have started using a program called Trello and it has increased production exponentially. We are pretty much done with the demo beta besides a few bugs and workarounds that makes it a bit more playable. We are setting something up in Trello so that it will be a lot easier for our beta testers to give direct feedback and bug reports. We are pretty excited to hear from you guys, we want the beta to be as playable as possible as we continue to improve on what is beginning to really impress me.

Ricky has finished this gorgeous map. We are extremely impressed with what he has done. Despite all the work he has done previously, this map is one of the best pieces of art he has created. Whitney’s vision on these places coming to life is really cool. I was skeptical of all the locations she had and wondered if it was too much. It looks perfectly balanced and the detail is so good I thought we could offer the full sized version to our backers as a wallpaper.

Over the course of developing this game we have had some good expectations and in a lot of ways when I test play our project we have met and exceeded anything I personally thought we could have achieved. I have grown so much with my pixel art and I continue to evolve as this project goes on. Jagen has been one of the more detailed and prominent characters in our game and he has been the bane of my existence, with all the detail that both Whitney and Ricky put on him. Yet I still am able to improve on what I was able to do before hand. A lot of people respect my work which makes me very proud. I never thought I would reach this level of achievement doing what I love.

We have had some gameplay changes and we would definitely like your opinion on it. Although we will continue to have jumping in our game, freely jumping anywhere you want will no longer be a feature. We had some visual and gameplay problems with it and in order to tie the project down in a clean and neat package we had to modify it the way we did. Now there will be jumping prompts where that aspect is available and hopefully we will maintain that free roam aspect and feel of the game.

We have also implemented a point and rage system within the combo and finisher system. There are now three buttons instead of 4 directions, having left and right seemed a bit redundant and the other button will more than likely be reserved for cancelling out of the melee attack position. The base combo points will start at 40 and progress as the game goes on. Up, which is the strongest attack has less accuracy and takes the bulk of the points. Left is the moderate attack and takes a modest amount of points and does middle of the road damage. Down does the least damage and has the most accuracy which takes the least points. They also have direction implications which will allow you to exploit an opponents weakness or discover its advantages. For example, attacking a flying enemy like a bat which has 100% evasion against your low attack would be useless so instead of spamming the attack button you will be planning out your attacks and hopefully this holds players attention to battle. Rage points are used to execute a combo finisher. You gather rage points as you do melee damage and are attacked. It is divided into 4 sections which attributes to the four levels of combo finishers. Our goal is to make the battles both fun visually and technically and help you connect with our characters both in and out of battle.

We hope you all enjoyed this update, we are definitely on our way!

Thanks again,

-Tyrell and Whitney White