Soon, you’ll be able to reshuffle your stats around with Alter Self, a new Relic Upgrade being added in the next build.

Note that even if you consider yourself the perfect planner who never makes mistakes or changes their mind about stat builds, Alter Self still has uses for you in that it can be used to re-distribute the 10 in everything you start with, as well as move around points granted by off-spec Essences. Alter Self is relatively cheap as upgrades go, costing only 5 Upgrade points. No Relics start with it, but you can pick it up pretty quickly at that price.

As the post title implies, you’ll be able to do this soon. I plan on releasing this build next Sunday the 28th! Not too much longer now. Cheers!

One important note reviewing this: the default stable size is now *3*. So Crown still has a stable size of 8 with it’s Capacity Up V upgrade.

The biggest change is of course to Fist: it’s now an Aux Guard/Power start. Appropriately, it gets no extra demon capacity since it won’t really need that if Aux Guard/Power are being used.

The other significant change is that a couple of other Relics with Upgrades that have become more expensive now only have a starting stable size of 5 instead of 6.

UI is close to done, just need some messaging about current upgrade points while in this interface and greying out ones you can’t afford. Costs shown here are not final, but they are an indication where my thoughts are heading. For reference, 10 is the “normal” cost for an upgrade. Less than 10 will be easier to get than an upgrade is in the current build, more than 10 will be harder.

The happy return of the starting ally selection screen.

And now, a quick peek at the two new starting ally choices: the Familiar and the Tulpa. (IMPORTANT: Abilities, stats, and resistances not necessarily final… though, as starter allies, their abilities will follow the format of “main ability”, Draw Wounds, Refresh, and “support ability”, and none of the main/support abilities are supposed to be all that exciting )

The new Relic being added in the next build is the Horns of the Hunt:

As you can see from the tooltip, the Horns of the Hunt’s starting upgrades will revolve around Brands, giving you a starting option that has some pre-investment in this new mechanic.

Exactly which upgrades it starts with will depend on what costs get assigned to Upgrades during the balance pass on them I’ll be doing as part of converting Upgrades to a point buy system: every Relic will start with the same number of points. Most of these will be pre-invested in the starting Upgrades for that Relic, but any leftovers will be placed in the unspent pool. It’s possible that for some Relics these leftovers may be enough to immediately buy a cheap Upgrade as soon as the game begins, if you like.

By the by, if you’re wondering what the Relic Wraith for a Horns Summoner looks like, that you’ll have to see in game. Cheers!

Alright, time to get back to it.

The next build’s main features are slated to be:

* Switching over to a point-based Relic Upgrade system. (i.e.: Rather than getting a Relic Upgrade every several levels, you will get an Upgrade Point each level, and Upgrades will cost varying amounts depending on their strength/usefulness. The “average” Upgrade will cost 10, but an individual Upgrade can cost however many makes sense for what it does.)

* The (sort of) return of starting demon selection: Starting next build, you will again be able to pick a starting demon at character creation, from among three demons that are only available at that time (or via Relic Wraith hunting…) The Homunculus will be joined by two other new starter demons, which I’ll post abut later.

* An 8th Relic will also be added to character creation, to accommodate more starting sets of Relic Upgrades.

This is obviously not going to be anywhere near as big a build as Brands was, so it will probably not take me over high a year to do. For a bit at least, I will be striving to do more bite-sized builds like these, rather than those that add sweeping changes like the Brand system. That’s not all bad news though, because next on the list after this build is adding more Tower floors.

Finally, to celebrate the resumption of development after my break, here’s another piece of fan art Zyalin made a little while back that we were saving for a special occasion. Thanks again Zyalin!

Reminder: I’ll be returning to active development around early/mid September. I’ll have some details about the next set of changes/goodies then. See you again soon!

Hey folks!

Well, it’s been a week, and so far the Brand build seems to be a great success. Much of the credit for that has to go to the folks who patiently endured the bugs and balance issues present in the test builds that I was providing for the last few months, so let me give a thank you to everyone who helped me out by playing those.

That said, squeaking in Demon time while also doing overtime at work has been kinda draining. Work is about to calm down soon, but I need a bit of a break before I jump back into the next piece of Demon development.

I will keep an eye on things here and on Discord in case any significant bugs pop up and address those promptly, as always. But, barring that, I plan on taking a break from development work for roughly 4-6 weeks. This will cover the remaining period of overtime at work (expected to be 1-3 weeks, a bit uncertain still) and also give me a bit of time to rest up from the Brand build push.

It will also give me time to enjoy a certain video game that came out last week… something about three houses.

Until sometime in September, thank you for all your support, and good luck in the Tower!