Continued from previous post...

When I say a small amount of the legwork, I mean that I replaced the already existing system I had but I haven't added save points to everywhere that they should be. Entering and leaving towns currently saves, and it will also save after a few story critical cutscenes but not all. Basically I've done the bare minimum for the system to work and I'll refine it over time to try and balance the save points. Choosing the save slot at the start also works but due to limitations it's possible to not choose a save slot and play without any saves at all. I think I'll leave that in though because fixing it would be way more work than is necessary and the game does freeze for a fraction of a second every time it saves. Having an option to avoid saving would be nice for speedrunning (yes I'm catering to that as well).

As a speedrunner myself of such recognised games as Alpha Protocol, I decided to look at what I found uninteresting about running that and find a way to make it fun in Aretisia. The game keeps track of and shows you the total time at the end, and in NG+ you can skip ALL dialogue. While Chain Shot is fun in AP, it makes for a fairly untechnical run overall. One of my goals with the skills was to make them varied enough that in a speedy environment they would all potentially have a use, which then trickles into regular gameplay too.

Obviously having a way to skip saving is something I'm leaving for runs as well. There's a couple other things like this where I'm trying to make the game fun to potentially speedrun, because I think that leads to gameplay that is also fun in a casual environment. Thinking about it I might remove the NG+ restriction from skipping dialogue boxes, as the key it's bound (pgdn) is out the way and impossible to hit by accident. It would also make NG runs more accessible as you don't have to wait for every dialogue box.

Basically I'm going to keep refining the save system, and I'm going to keep designing for fun speedy runs. There's some real potential for difficult run categories as well, as NG+ has three different modes:

Regular NG+: All your items, skills, and stats carry over from the previous save
Level Reset: All your items carry over, but all your skills and stats are reset
Clean Reset: EVERYTHING is reset

Because of how NG+ works (different NG+ levels that boost enemy levels by X amount) it's possible to do a NG+100 clean reset run where all the enemies have their level boosted by 100 and you start with nothing. I'll be honest, I don't think it's possible without a lot of grinding.

Seeing as I'm talking about NG+ as well, I'll quickly explain how it'll work. When you beat the game you unlock NG+10 where all enemies are 10 levels higher than normal, and that is the default NG+ experience. Beating +10 unlocks +20, which unlocks +30, unlocking +40, unlocking +50, and then unlocking +100. This means it takes at least 6 playthroughs to unlock the highest NG+ level, and by beating NG+100 under certain conditions you can unlock a special item that grants access to a superboss that guards a debug item. If you know what you're doing, this will take at least 8 playthroughs to unlock. If you then choose to do a run that I consider impossible after unlocking the debug item, you'll get a small reward to thank you for being so insane enough for pulling it off.