Is it time for another post already?

Just wanted to keep you all up to date on what's been going on. Demo 1 entered testing a few weeks ago and has been receiving updates constantly, though right now I'm at a bit of a shortage for testers. I have a couple more playtests lined up before I can think about giving Demo 1 to the world, but I have been hard at work behind the scenes.

In the first couple days of the test build being live I made some fairly small balance changes/bug fixes while I was waiting for playtests to happen. I left it for almost two weeks after that, and then came back with an absolutely massive list of changes. Some of the highlights:

• A complete economy rework. Money was too easy to obtain and items were too cheap, resulting in the player obtaining thousands by the time they were done with the demo. This has now been scaled drastically in the opposite direction - income is severely reduced and items, while still fairly cheap, now are drastically more expensive due to the whole economy being changed. Buying items now requires decision making, however due to the overall cost of items being low you aren't screwed if you waste all your money - you just have to spend a small amount of time grinding.
• Complete rework of multitarget skills. Well, kind of - some still work how they used to. Previously they were using the base RMMV's random target selection, which has a chance of hitting the same target multiple times - this is now changed to hit unique targets. This just makes more sense and adds a bit more decision making again, while changing some skills from "potentially devastating to a single target" to "great for crowd damage and little else".
• A complete change of how the save system works. Previously you picked a save slot at the start of the game and it would autosave for you. Now you don't even pick a save slot. You only have one slot. The load menu was completely removed for a while but I'm adding it back soon with a completely new appearance, I think people will really like it (even though you only see it when you go from the main menu to in-game).
• Changed Poppy's basic skill text. Poppy's base skill has always been a protection buff that gives one character a small increase to defence for the rest of the turn, but it replaced her attack action. The attack text was never replaced, leading to a lot of confusion the first time people tried "attacking" with her. It now correctly says protect!
• Spontaneity is a really big thing and a mechanic wholly unique to this game (unless I've missed another game with something similar to it!), so it needs explaining somewhere. There are two tutorials in the game (both skippable), one during the first battle that explains battle mechanics and one the first time you visit a shop that explains items. Previously the spontaneity explanation was lumped at the end of the item tutorial (I guess because it's affected by items?), but it really should've been in the battle tutorial instead. This would've been especially confusing if you played the battle tutorial but skipped the item tutorial, as a core battle mechanic would go completely unexplained. This has obviously been changed given how much I've just written about it, spontaneity is now explained in the battle tutorial.
• Quite a funny blunder is that I misunderstood how crits worked for the longest time. I assumed they were 2x damage, but apparently the base RMMV engine sets them to 3x. They've now been dialled back to how I thought they worked and the world is a better place because of it.

And this is just a few of the changes. There have been so many more that I really don't have time to explain, either because they're very boring or very small. This past month has been absolutely huge in terms of pushing the game forward, and I'm really excited to be able to release the first demo soon. Like I said I'm just waiting on a couple more playtests to gauge the general attitude towards a certain puzzle, but once that's done and any adjustments that need to be made are made, I think we'll be ready to open the gates. Demo 2 will undergo a similar testing process before release but I imagine it won't be quite as rigorous as Demo 1 now that the fundamental issues are largely resolved.

As always thank you very much for reading, and if you want to help test the game ahead of release I'd recommend joining my Discord server. I won't say no to more people wanting to help test the game. The current release schedule is looking solid, so you can definitely expect to see Demo 1 before the end of April. I hope to see you then!