I Summon Thee!

 Here we are again. Last week, I worked on a few improvements suggested by a player and one of my testers, mostly around summons. Now, your summons also recover MP when you interact with mana pools around the world, and they appear in the menu, so you can use skills and items on them. This should make the game easier, but I don't think we'll need any rebalancing (the game is generally easy anyway, especially if you track down the optional summons). Making them appear in the menu was relatively easy, but it took me some digging around to make sure things looked okay. There is the possibility of old saves displaying or not displaying the correct stuff, but I'll be able to tell you guys more once testers get to try things out.

Another change I added is related to Gaart. I added an item in the 3rd temple that will buff him a little once you pick it up. Gaart really falls behind later on, especially when compared to the other summons, so this should make him a bit more viable (this might need more balancing, but this also will need to be tested out).

There is also a new scene if you get drunk at Solina beach (the amount of scenes for getting drunk there is pitiful, so this should help).

As for the coming weeks, more scenes (usually repeatable ones to wrap up the content of some secondary NPCs) are on the horizon, and more miscellaneous stuff from my to-do list (hopefully I can add one or two things to the magic academy that I wanted to get around to for a while, for example).

This SHOULD be the 1.0 release, for better or for worse (although as mentioned I expect to have 2-3 months with minor updates, bugfixes, walkthrough updates and so on, even as I focus more on the next game), we'll see if I can keep this deadline, for once!

Regardless, I don't think I can mess this up too much even if I tried, so if it gets really bad, we release the 1.0 in March and that will be it, so nothing to worry about. For now though, that's all for this week's dev blog. See you in 7 days for another report! ^_^