This week’s update brings many bugfixes and is also the point where I’ve started taking last week’s plans on how to change the game going forward… …meaning that work on the core game continues.

First, some battle system issues were addressed – the reason why Infidemia’s combat wasn’t working in the first place was because I combined a list of all actions in the game, from 2 different versions of it, which overwrote most pre-existing actions. It’s messy to combine database information like this, but the goal was to get as much of the eventing/custom statuses saved, and then rearrange the game’s list of battle actions. Using the events and custom statuses, most core mechanics are back to working, though some bugfixes were required for the wager system to work properly; despite events being made for it, I had to carry over some changes from a test version of the game where most bugfixes were made. I could have probably been more efficient by only working on bugfixes in the core game, and not a test version of it.

Second, the plans for the game’s story are still being revised, mostly because I don’t know what I’m doing. After a few different attempts at how the beginning should work, I decided that the game’s introduction will focus more on a tutorial rather than a prologue, while giving hints of the story. This is meant to be a decision-based story, but I’ve mostly made a story that focuses on one set path of decisions, so the future plans for Infidemia’s story will try to factor in more options.

With this update, though, here are some new features for Infidemia:

• Coffee Time has been added to the game, and is now usable.
• The school and tutorials are being worked on, with the core system and one lesson working. This also means homework has been added.

Although I’ve announced many considerations for features, and bugfixes on some, with this version of the game, these are currently the only two main features, besides another part of Infidemia that I’m still working on. I think I was too ambitious in my initial planning of the game, as I thought of a lot of features and then tried to add half of every feature into the game, rather than a complete version of a few simplified features. Starting with a smaller plan could have helped me get to this update sooner, but I’m still glad I worked on other mechanics, as it helped me learn about eventing, which gave me some practice for working on the core features of Infidemia.

Still, I don’t think anything’s really “ready” or “finalized” for Infidemia yet, as it’s in development and even with working mechanics, finding balance in gameplay mechanics, and in difficulty to reward ratios, is what I’ll have to work on once all core gameplay features are functional.

From a player standpoint, I don’t know if development updates are going to be useful when playing the game. There’s no demo or gameplay yet that can be tested or seen, so these development updates aren’t a fair way to show what the game is like.

Sometimes I use these updates as notes to check what I said I was working on and make sure it’s accurate; from where development is right now as of publishing this post, I’d say this is a representation of where the game is currently.

I’d like to show more of the game (like with the custom text box design) though I think it would be better if I have a working version of it ready; it’s not going to be good by any means, when it is ready, but I would like it to at least be working so getting feedback is possible (compared to previous versions of the game, which had game-breaking bugs that made Infidemia unplayable).

Thanks for reading this,

-ZoruaAl