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Weekly Update - Revised Elements!

3 years ago1,394 words

This week, I made some significant revisions to Alora Fane's six elements, plus refinements to the affinities system I talked about last week, and some other miscellaneous things.

Productivity's been fairly meh this week, though I have made some progress.

The most notable thing I did was revise the elements (after saying last week that I probably shouldn't): both their relationships, and their names. I wrote about the reasoning behind that ∞ on my Patreon ∞ earlier in the week - since I was aware I hadn't posted there in ages and it helped to work through some ideas - so I'll just summarise the end result here, which is this:



All of them except Fear have new names (Bliss is now Harmony, Destruction is Discord, Courage is Passion, Sorrow is Languor, Creation is Viva), and they're now effective against the one clockwise in the cycle, but also the one opposite. So Harmony and Discord are opposed, for example, which fits a lot better for how I'd already been writing Atonal Dreams' story (and these elements in general since I first came up with them).

(Why is that discussion app named a word that means "disagreement between people", anyway? Do they want it to be for toxic communities??)


The inspiration for this revision came from working with the affinities which I wrote about last week while in the middle of figuring them out. I decided that what I had before - two offensive and one defensive affinities for each type - was overly complex, so I revised it so that all types are paired into 'dark' and 'light' sides which oppose one another. So increasing affinity for one decreases it for the other.



The way it works is that each item that you can equip has three affinities: an element, a rune, and a creature type. These are shown by the colours in the gradient, or when you hover over a piece of equipment its associated affinities light up, like you can see here (though the light-up colour - which is used for all cursors in the game - shifts through a rainbow of hues that I can't show in a static screenshot).

When one affinity increases, its opposing affinity decreases. So a piece of equipment that increases your Harmony (formerly Bliss) affinity will decrease your Discord (formerly Destruction) affinity.

Affinities have offensive and defensive functions that combine what I had before. An increased Harmony affinity would increase the power of Harmony skills you use, and damage against Harmony targets - both at once if you used a Harmony skill on a Harmony target - but you'd also take more damage from Harmony skills yourself. Elements are (still) super effective against themselves (this gives each three weaknesses: itself, its opposite, and the anticlockwise adjacent), so if you knew you were venturing into, say, a Discord-heavy dungeon, equipping a lot of Discord-affinity stuff would increase your offence against those targets, but also make you more vulnerable to them. Personally I find this more interesting than gaining offence AND defence against them, but we'll have to see how it plays out. I'll surely continue tweaking everything as development goes on.

The actual percentage multipliers for affinities are relatively small compared to other things like targeting a weakness with a skill's element or rune. I want them to feel worthwhile but not overpowered. I'll probably continue tweaking those numbers, too.

I still need to actually make a bunch of equipment items; the ones Collie's got equipped here are just potion reagents I'd already drawn icons for ages ago, repurposed into placeholder equipment. Instead of accessories being magic rings and amulets or whatever, instead I do intend them to be just any old objects that reinforce certain connotations in the character's mind. Skills are mental, after all. I've been wanting to use the term 'Memento' - previously used for equipment in Taming Dreams - so this allows me to do that. It all makes sense with the lore and I find it more interesting than generic fantasy equipment! I'll need to brainstorm some ideas for specific mementos you could get though, and what affinities they'd have.


I spent most of the rest of the week playing the game through from the start (for the billionth time) with the intention of fixing and polishing each individual scene or battle as I went on, so I've done some writing and bug fixing and stuff. I spent several hours trying to fix one bug in particular - which is too esoteric to even try to explain - which I hope I finally actually did in the end!!

I revised how speech bubbles look (though I'd be surprised if you remember how they looked before):




I've also been revising Collie's dialogue so it's all lowercase and has some kind of an uncouth accent, which I feel is appropriate for someone who grew up outside ordered society... though I wonder how many people will just perceive it as sloppiness on my part.

I also composed a piece of music - or re-composed, I suppose, because I have a previous version that I didn't like - for the World Map, which I might put on Patreon once I've finished incessantly tweaking it.

Next week, I'll continue going through each of the scenes and making sure they all work as they should.



I mentioned last week that I'd for sure finally decide on which PC to get this week. Well guess what?? I ACTUALLY DID!! Who ever would have thought it possible?!

I won't mention the specs in case anyone has any criticisms, because it's probably too late to change things now and all that'd do is make me feel irritated and miserable. They're mostly the same as what was suggested to me, anyway, and thankfully the website actually prevented me from making clashing decisions, so I'm hoping everything's compatible. I spent like £2500 on it, which is like three or four months' worth of my meagre Steam + Patreon income, so that's... uncomfortable. But my computer is basically my life, so it's not like I set the money on fire and threw it in the toilet or anything.

(It's not here yet; I'll likely have to wait a week or two more for it to arrive.)

I've also almost finished Legends of: Pokemon Arceus, after somewhere between 30 and 40 hours; I'm just doing some post-game stuff now. I have mixed (but mostly positive) feelings about it, which I'd like to write a blog about, but who knows whether I'll find the time and energy to do that. Maybe I should just write one containing brief summaries of my thoughts about all the games I've been meaning to write about... Ehh.

What else? Oh, the UK was hit by a SEVERE STORM - Storm Eunice - yesterday, which a bunch of news outlets were saying was the worst on record either in a long time or ever, that there'd be 100mph+ winds - literally hurricane speeds - and everyone had to stay inside, etc. Thankfully it barely affected where I am - the leaves on trees weren't even swaying any more than usual - but I think some places in the south were hit at least somewhat harder. It's comical though comparing the UK's 'extreme' weather to that from other countries that actually have disasters like tornadoes and monsoons. The way the news articles were presenting it made my anxiety demons recall this episode of The Simpsons where Ned Flanders' house is destroyed in a hurricane:



But when I checked actual news sources to see what had happened, one spent a whole paragraph on a dog walker getting told off by the police for being out in a park, to which he felt the officer was being overly excited (which I tweeted about, but I had to trim most of the quote and context out - the character limit is so suffocating! - so it probably elicited a 'huh?' response, about which I've been cringing... which is why I basically never tweet!). Trees falling down and chimneys falling off roofs seem to be the worst effects. A big difference from countries that report widespread structural devastation and massive death tolls!