Merry Christmas :
Hello everyone!
I hope you are enojying your halloween. While I know, I've stated in the previous developer update, it would be the last one before the release of the update however, there were some developments about the game I thought would be worth mentioning here. As for the update itself, I'm currently finished with content for Mnemosyne and got majority of the Dreamwalker content animated. All thats left is finishing the implementation of the enemies and completing the rest of the questlines. Of course after that it will be time for some bugfixing and finishing touches, this will be going in parallel to the last beta test for V5.
During the programming of the scenes with Mnemosyne I also worked on the Soul Points Mechanic which is indirectly tied to the her content. The best way to describe the Soul Points would be calling them backup experience points. Player will be able to obtain them in various ways similiar to experience points, however they won't be able to be targeted by enemy Level/Exp drain moves, although it doesn't mean that soul points as a resource are 100% safe. Apart from that the player will be able to convert his experience points to Soul Points in order to stockple some experience for later or de-level himself if deemed necessary. Together with this feature, from V5 onwards the player will no longer regain levels after death and will be left with experience points he had at the time of death. Instead, after death you will have the choice to convert the Soul Points into EXP in order to regain power, up to certain limit of course. My reasoning behind this change is the fact that when the player level could be infinitely reset, the experience points of the player character would be basically an infinite resource, which limits my design space as it enables exploits when paired with other mechanics be it current or upcoming. What happens when the player does not have enough Soul Points to level himself enough? Well, there's a certain goddess willing to restore his power. In V5, every death will return the player character to Mnemosyne's Domain where he will have to endure whatever the banished goddess has prepared for him. Mnemosyne is now more involved in the early game, having scenes in-between Suzanna's introduction questline. For example, when drained by the three succubi in the Scattered Castle you will now have the option to ask Mnemosyne and have her restore your power to what it once was. Will she do it for free? Not always
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Together with soul points there will be a small update to the fetish system. The current fetish system is quite invisible to the player as the changes to the fetish values by enemy moves aren't really telegraphed. In order to increase the visibility of these values I have introduced something called corruption level. The corruption level basically takes all of the fetish values player has and based on them assigns the player a value from 0 to 5, with higher meaning the higher level of corruption. The corruption levels will come with additional penalties and will encourage the player to reduce them. Another important change that's worth mentioning is that fetish values will now have an upper limit, with the fetishes chosen as weaknesses having double the limit. This will prevent the stamina damage from enemy moves from spiraling out of control. The corruption level will be shown in the GUI together with other essential player stats as shown below.