Status Pages, Branding Update & a Sneak Peak into Game2

Last night, I completely altered all of the Steam-based artwork surrounding Cross of Auria and its DLC packages. This includes everything on the store all the way down to the game icon.

Today, while working on Game2, I came up with a theme to move forward with for the Status and Elements pages. The elements page now shows up to 2 icons per element: the "physical attack is this element" and general element icon. You may have become familiar with some of these via the updated ability tooltips over the last few weeks. The status page now includes all of the Breaks, has removed Shear which was for the last few weeks listed on that page as "Deprecated" with a minus sign, and better reflects some of the newer icons. You can find these changes in the menu, Status -> Elements & Status -> States.

You may notice that Arcane and Psychic share a general icon. I'm not going to adjust that between now and the end. It'll just be one of those weird quirks that stems from not thinking things all the way through 9 years ago when it was first implemented and now its too late to do anything about it.

A sneak peak into Game2...

Speaking of psychic... Psychic, Dragon, and Ghost are leaving as elements as we move into Game2, but their concepts are staying. Psychic attacks utilize the opposite stat, mag for physical attacks and atk for magical attacks, which will be kept as a concept but not an element in Game2. Ghost will fall in with Dark and Soul where applicable. Dragon is outright eliminated, disseminating their skills across other elements and relying primarily on Physical as an element.

I've already come up with a much better way to handle weapons and armor. Rather than each weapon be its own type (Dagger, Sword, Katana, Axe, etc), the system-based types will be One-Hand, Two-Hand, and Dual-Wield for Game2. Similarly with armor - Light, Medium, & Heavy have been retained while oddballs like "Cloak", "Scabbard", "Ring", etc have all been dropped. Combined with what I now know about making Skills and utilize required weapons, multiple elements & the like, player decision about equipment will come more from building the character the player's way rather than based on what they or their class could equip. If you want to run 4 tanks, who am I to stop you?

I estimate it will probably take somewhere in the neighborhood of 6 months to make a playable campaign ready for release. The next few weeks go to stripping down CoA to the bones, fixing broken zones, removing all NPCs/characters/items/skills/etc, and then finally starting to add back. Here's what I can tell you about Game2 so far:

• Story follows Ruby and Alex shortly after the ending of CoA 1, having suddenly departed the four kingdoms area.

• Expands on the monster capture system to join Ruby & Alex in combat.

• Explores previously unexplored lands on Isis while also incorporating returning zones from the Revan region.

• Will not be released as a live service or with planned post-launch DLC. Going to move into spacing out releases as their own game, rather than expos. Remember: the original CoA released in 2018 had a 20+hr campaign with challenging side content which has since been updated to ~60hrs if you do everything there is to do. I realistically should've made 2 more small games instead.

We probably won't talk too much more about Game2 before the Steam page is setup and wishlists can begin. I have pretty much completed the storyboard for this game already and can tap into assets made for CoA that never saw the light of day. And I will do my very best to see if I can make Game2 detect the completion achievement for CoA for bonus start-of-game items, but I can't promise that yet. I don't know if the engine allows for that kind of technology (it was hard enough getting it to talk to Steam for achievements to begin with!)

In other news, there may only be a few more random updates like this to CoA that aren't patch related. Ex: I might remove the visible but inaccessible areas of Den An'ura, Snowdrift Village, etc. But my development focus is shifting entirely to Game2.