Hey all, welcome back to another development update for Hero Soul. It's been a week since I got back from travelling and I've had the pleasant experience of being sick ever since I got back. That aside however, this week I'd like to discuss what is to come after the release of the new Demo. Overall, I am quite happy with the quality of game play the  demo shows and am pretty sure that this will be close to what the final will look like. That being said, there are still a few milestones I would like to reach on the way to the finished product other than completing the story.

Talent Trees:

This has been on the back burner for a while and with all the changes, the modular talent tree system for the game needs some love. Currently the talent tree system is one of those things that has not been well integrated into game play. Like the old deck building system, the talent tree system required the player to leave the level to change. Following the changes to the deck building, I want to streamline the talent tree so it can be changed in level like the cards in your Arcana. Here's a WIP of what I mean. 

So as mentioned before, the title of the game Hero Soul alludes to something the player receives that allows them to learn from heroes of the past. I thought that this idea fit perfectly thematically to the talent tree system. Before, I thought it would be a neat idea for the tree to be modular allowing you to learn from many heroes, but in the end that just ended up being a confusing mess and almost impossible for me to explain to new people. So for now, for this new implementation of the tree, I will keep it simple and vanilla. When the Hero Soul is obtained the player picks which hero archetype the would like to go and that's it.  As a side note, you may notice an large icon on the bottom left of the skill tree, that is for the break skill. My current plan is to change the break skill based on the hero selected for a little more variance in game play :p.

Companions: 

Companions were originally as fun idea I had based off of games like Secrets of Mana. Your less than intelligent AI friend made journeying and exploring a bit less lonely.  Originally I thought of giving each of these character's there own unique story, in the form of having each of them as a playable character, but that idea seems more like an after release of the full game kind of thing after looking at the scope of each. So I thought it would be a fine use of resources to convert the characters that aren't being played into pick able companions. In the demo you are introduced to your first companion Leon, and later on you will be introduced to the last 2 companions Risette and Sparrow. So moving forward I would like to get their sprites and AI finished (Perhaps even a bit of tuning of their AI so they can dodge...), so that in future missions you will have an option of companions. Anyways that leads me to the update portion. I worked heavily on spriting this week Risette's character. I think the turned out pretty well all things considered. Here's a reference with the sprites.

 

Still have a few more sheets to do, but these should be enough for me to start programming the AI!

Controller Support and Local Co-Op(Maybe)

This has been and idea I've been kicking around for a while. I've come to realize that my game is pretty hard to show off at conventions simply because it's on the PC and is not multiplayer. Adding controller support is already a given and I only cut it from the Demo because I needed to do some remapping. But more importantly it was brought to my attention at a convention that adding a local Co-op might be quite fun for players. I mean, the companion already lends to having another player, and honestly would eliminate the dumb AI. We'll see if I have time do implement Co-op, but definitely a fun idea to kick around.

That's it for this week! I'm all better now and ready to get back to work!