It's time for another devlog so you can read more about what I'm cooking at the moment.

Quality of Life

Both of these things are ongoing tasks that I sneak in between longer stretches of features and fixes. I try to find the parts of the game that create the most uneeded friction and tweak it. Here's a few quick changes/additions:

• Distinguisher icons: You can assign an icon to an Animon making it easier to remember which one is which (for when you have several Animons with the same name)
• Entropy dice effect will now also give you +1 re-roll when triggered, making it a little more effective (especially with Fatesworn tricks)
• Sticker cards now look different and have the word "sticker" on them to show they aren't inventory items
• Teaching a trick to an Animon right after receiving it, for example from a chest, to avoid unnessecary trips to the inventory or the often "oops, forgot to teach the trick" moments (which of course never ever happens to me, the developer, who plays the game perfectly, always)
• Some visual polish, transition animations, and more

Balancing and Builds

After watching people play and hearing feedback, I started changing a few mechanics to make the experience better while maintaining the challenging part. One of the bigger changes was making Trick Fusion accessible anytime from the run menu. Before that, you could access it when visiting a Hammam but since most need heal when they visit, the Fusion was rarely used. 

That's a shame though because that's where all the interesting and potentially game-breaking things happen! In case you haven't tried it yet, with Trick Fusion you can upgrade and customize tricks. When you have a duplicate of a learned trick in your inventory, you can use that to either increase the potency or reduce the cost. Alternatively, you can transfer a flavor from a trick in your inventory to a learned trick. That means, for example, putting "Fatesworn" on a Fury trick even though they don't normally have access to that flavor.

I want to try what happens if you can use Fusion whenever you want and as many times as you can. When designing systems, I usually try to lean towards empowering the player and only add restrictions when I see there are problems.

In that regard, I'm also thinking about allowing using items and switching Animons during battle as many times as you want, too. However, I need to think about how to handle quirks that trigger from switching, like Difdagua's Fidgety quirk. I want to avoid empty meta actions like always swapping Difdagua out and in at the start of a turn because you get the damage bonus for free. Maybe I'll have to change its quirk completely, maybe not, we'll see... more thinking required!

More Tools to Build Builds

The change to Fusion access is one of several moves for adding more tools for creating run builds. One of the cool things of roguelikes is finding a way to improve a niche mechanic and play around it, like for example benefiting from getting knocked out and then building a team around getting knocked out and revive. That's silly and I love it!

So I'm reducing the amount of flash drives you get and increase the amount of stickers. Stickers are run-wide buffs for you and your entire team, the type of thing that's usually the core building block of run builds. Your traditional roguelite recipe is beating a fight and then picking an upgrade. While I do want to saunter away from too many "typical" genre mechanics, and I do want tricks to still be an integral part of builds, I feel like some mechanics are worth sticking to and stickers being a bit neglected so I'll stick to making stickers stick. Yeah? Sorry. Couldn't resist.

At the moment, you get stickers from vending machines and from chest (if lucky) but I want to add them now as part of battle rewards. Since an Animon also gives you a free flash drive when leveling up, I can reduce their availability a little.

On top of that, I plan to add more uses to flash drives outside of just teaching tricks. They're supposed to be its own stack of action resource for specific cases, basically a currency for "I don't like my options, I want something else". During battle, I want players to be able to burn a flash drive from the inventory for a one-time effect that is tied to what aspect and and what cost it has. I am not sure yet what the effects will be, if it is straight damage or giving you extra dice points to spend but it's going to be something. One of the problems right now is once you have all Animons equipped with tricks that you like, your inventory fills up with flash drives that you don't really need anymore except for potential fusion upgrades.

The burning of flash drives should give them value beyond that. Outside of battle, that could also be used on certain nodes to gain bottle caps, or maybe even unlock a path to go to a different lane. We'll see what I come up with!

Boss Aspect: Unstable

Another thing that was irking me was bosses using specific aspect tricks. Malyx has the Fury trick Steam Dart and Zehilsila has several Patience tricks. That sucks for players who happen to have one or more Animons of the aspect that is weak to it. You're basically at a disadvantage for taking Halazoom as a starter and that is 100% something I do not want.

The bosses were created a while ago and pretty quickly, using the elements I had. I think Ymsick still has the same move set as Malyx which is... yeah, I should get on top of that, shouldn't I? Well, I am! I changed the bosses literally yesterday! Huzzah!

Bosses now have a unique aspect called Unstable which is not an aspect in itself and more a mechanic. Unstable causes the aspect of the boss to change every turn randomly (while avoiding the previous aspect). This way, every turn has new conditions for both sides, requiring to adapt on the fly. One turn, your active Animon might be weak against the boss and the next turn it might be turned around. To make the aspect change have more consequences, I also added a new trick flavor called "Chameleon". A chameleon trick will always have the same aspect as its owner. It takes the first aspect in case there are two but I want to expand it to support two aspects as well.

Malyx now has the trick Spiral Lance instead of Steam Dart and will change its aspects as well. I still have to figure out how to deal with the dice as they need to probably change aspects too but... that requires introducing additional dice effects ontop of their regular effects and I want to add that properly which means the bosses will have static dice aspects for now.

New Stickers Preview

Here's a sneak peek of a few upcoming stickers:

• Necromancer: When an Animon gets defeated, it permanently gains +1 to all stats
• Authentic Archeologist: Whenever you open a chest, gain bottle caps
• Portable Scorpion: All damage tricks have a 3% chance to apply 2 stacks of poison
• Cool Sugar: Healing items heal 25% more
• Collector: Catching an Animon heals your party for 30%
• The Angry 1: Whenever you roll a 1, the opponent takes 1 damage
• Exploding Shield: Whenever you lose a shield, the enemy takes 1 damage
• Monochrome: When all your Animons have the same aspect, they get +4 dedication

Indie Games Fest Cologne

As for completely different news, Soulblaze is going to be showcased on the Indie Game Fest in Cologne on July 11th and 12th. This is going to be the first time I'll be physically showing the game somewhere and I'm hyped! If you are in the area, come by and say hi! Day tickets are 20€ and you get to play a whole bunch of indie games.