First up, sprites of Recca!

Second up, the creator of ORK Framework (which I’m relying on for Dreamblazers) is putting out a new product called Makinom soon that will eventually be able to integrate with ORK and could have interesting implications on making scripting easier for me as the person who’s occupying the programmer position without actually being a programmer. Definitely looking forward to how that one turns out since it could have a positive impact on everything I’m doing that doesn’t involve ORK nor 2D Toolkit.

Third and last up: as I’ve still been balancing bonuses from the fashion system, it’s just become too inefficient to repeatedly change multiple bonuses during testing because I have hundreds of them. This leaves me with a few options in descending order of preference:

• Pump up enemy stats, therefore ditching the idea that players should be reasonably able to beat the game with each character wearing her canon outfit. With the possible exception of Pokémon, every RPG ever requires the player to frequently tweak their equipment—and I’m even aiming to make that process a lot more fun than normal, so would it really be a bad thing if people have to play with it? Rather than balancing so that a casual player can beat the game without changing clothes, maybe I should balance so that a hardcore player can beat the game without changing clothes: it could be a self-imposed challenge, which is what those players (and I’m including myself) are all about anyway. There are more fashions than there will be monsters even in the final game, so this would be a faster solution.
• Make fashion bonuses harder to obtain. Right now a player has to rack up four points in the same style, which isn’t too difficult given ten outfit slots and with most pieces of clothing giving points to at least three styles. Even making it five points would actually be significant—it would mean half the slots need to be used for a bonus.
• Universally reduce the strength of fashion bonuses even further. This would technically work, but the thing I don’t like about it is that if they don’t give at least a 10% bonus for mixing two styles then it wouldn’t feel like coordinating outfits is even worth the time.

So that’s where I’m at!