21,008: that’s the number of spambot IP addresses now blocked from this site. But enough whining: on to more interesting things!

Much like Flora’s character portraits push me forward to do them justice with the writing and dialogue, Alex’s character pixel art pushes me forward to do justice to the animations. It’s not my natural strength, in all honesty—that would be writing, imagining, and especially crunching numbers—but I certainly love what I see from Alex and I hope you all do too. :D

Speaking of crunching numbers, I’m feeling pretty satisfied now with the fashion system rebalancing I talked about last week. I’m changing my thinking on how to handle earning new outfits, though; because several of the main characters are fairly isolated from society and have little or nothing in the way of money, originally the primary way to get new clothes would be when new characters join the party. One interesting side effect of this design is that players could appreciate new characters for the tangible benefits they bring to the table even if they don’t like their personalities. However, if it’s harder to get fashion bonuses then new clothes can also be handed out a little more frequently than before.

The enemy rebalancing, on the other hand, isn’t quite where I want it to be yet. This took a long while to get right the first time around before I decided to change the fashion system, so I might just revert the enemies to what they were before and live with a slightly easier game.