My contributions to the next release

Hey everyone! It’s a bit earlier than we were planning on but NM has been sick so this week I’ll be telling you about what I’ll be adding in the upcoming release while he works on feeling better!

Before we get started, I’d like to thank everyone who’s given suggestions for the new satisfaction menu while we’ve run into delays in getting the updates to this version hammered out, the changes that we’ve talked about for fixing it up visually will probably be in by the public release, though I’m sorry to say but until I’ve got more of it done I don’t have much else to say on the matter…

But what I do have done, you can thank Flutterby for requesting that we add elemental resistances to the status menu! After talking with NM about it I got to work on some quick mock-ups which the patreons gave us some much needed feedback on for me to get to work on, so how about I show what you can expect from the new status screen to start off with?

First off, when in the status menu you’ll be able to switch between page 1 and page 2 with either the standard Z button (or whatever you have set to be the ‘OK’ button) or with the CTRL button like in the equipment menu. Also, you might notice that at the top of the elemental resistances are ‘melee’ and ‘projectile’, you might be seeing a few new interesting features dealing with those soon, but that’s not my department.

What IS my department though is that new ‘Fire Damage’ addition above your equipment! Not only does it prevent weird visual issues where your weapon name would overlap with the page number, but now the game tells you what kind of damage you do with regular attack along with several skills, pretty neat huh? Not only that but whenever you or the enemy does damage no longer will it just say, “150 damage’ but now it’ll tell you “150 melee damage” or “300 force damage”, this should help out a lot with knowing how to best utilize resistances, especially when you encounter enemies who don’t do melee or projectile damage with their regular attacks, there are more of then then you’d think! Though some bad news in regards to attack elements, players who fancied bashing in zombie heads with the necronomicon or cutting angels while blessed may find their damage reduced. See, it turns out that RPG Maker had it so that whenever you attacked it looked at ALL your elements and used the damage from the strongest one, which wasn’t really ever intended for this game, it has now been fixed so that whatever element you see in the status menu is the damage you will do, regardless as to if the enemy is strong or weak to it (the priority is weapon coatings > blessing > accessory > off-hand > weapon > unarmed), so make sure you plan accordingly!

Next you might have noticed that the ‘Fire Damage’ is green, there’s a reason for this, see from now on whenever you have a status effect that changes anything on the status page (except HP and MP) it will turn green if the net result of your statuses improves it, or red if the net result weakens them, in this case because I have a fire weapon coating on Hero he’s doing fire damage, all attack elements from statuses will be green, so yeah next time you’ve got some nausea or blessing and you’re not sure what it changes, try looking in your status screen to see what numbers are now green and what are red!

Finally for the status screen, some of you who are very familiar with the game might have noticed that in the example I gave Hero has a weapon coating which can only be used in battle and wear off when it’s over, you might also notice that the status menu here has a solid background while usually it’s semi-transparent, there’s a reason that both of these are happening in the picture I provided, you can now access the status menu in battle. We’ve replaced the eternally greyed out ‘escape’ command with a new ‘Status’ command that will let you look at the status of whoever is in battle, well in battle. Combine this with the earlier mention of how stats which are changed are now displayed in red and green and you’ll be able to see for yourself what various statuses do! This is a pretty big step in making the wiki unnecessary if you ask me, and one that I fully embrace.

You will also be able to find the new elemental resistances in the equipment menu as well, on a new page 3. You won’t get the full names of them since I only had about half the space to work with, but I’m hoping to put in the first one or two letters of every element next to the icon into the page later today! So yeah, that’s what I’ve been working on for this past week, I was hugely mistaken in believing that it’d only take me a day or two tops to get it all done but I’m rather happy with how it’s all turned out, what do you guys think?