Lord of Lies Devlog #6

October 14th 

Hey guys, it’s Joy! I’ve been doing A LOT of writing. So I think this week it’s appropriate to discuss that!

With more writing lol

Story

‘Lord of Lies’ consists of cutscenes, lots and lots of cutscenes. Which are essentially the visual novel sections but with some cute little pixel art sprites to also look at.

The pixel character sprites move and emote, while the scenes are playing which adds an extra layer to the visual novel cutscenes.

There are lots of these in the game, and I am 100% going to add a skip cutscene functionality to enable replayability to the game. As the game is quite wordy!

Lord of Lies doesn’t even feel like something I’ve wrote at times. Getting back into Fantasy writing after writing almost exclusively slice of life for a couple years has been quite an adjustment, however it’s also been really fun!

In terms of progress of the story I am nearly finished with ACT 1.

There’s also a Prologue section that consists of 9 current cutscenes (these numbers and pretty much everything presented in this devlogs is subject to change.) But 9 so far, and ACT 1 is also 9 cutscenes. I have finished 7/9 (hoping to finish those last 2 today).

Then, I can start working on ACT 2 starting Monday! ACT 2 is the longest section of the game, you gain the most party members, visit the most locations, fight the most enemies, and see most of the main story. So, once I have finished it I will feel so much better about my current progress.

I want to finish the entire main story by Halloween (it’ll be rough, but it will exist, I can make it great later.)

Gameplay

The second thing I’d like to talk about is a change I have made to combat encounters. 

Before, it was Pokemon style encounters where you walk around and randomly enter an encounter.

Now, I have decided it would be a lot more rewarding and less frustrating to have on map enemy encounters instead.

I loved the way they were handled in Persona 4 especially!

Equipped with Party and Enemy advantages. If the enemy and you see each other there will be no advantage.

If the enemy gets behind you and touches you, there will be an enemy advantage.

If the player gets behind the enemy there is a player advantage!

Next Week’s Devlog Sneak Peak

Don’t be surprised if these devlogs get a little shorter, I wanted to share some noteworthy things, right now I am busy, busy trying to make sure I hit all my deadlines big and small. 

Just know I am having fun and making progress, and right now that’s all that really matters.

Thank you for reading and stay tuned for next week where I explain some very basic character to character interactions i.e 

Gala and Prince are siblings, Gala is the older sister… 

or Lawrence and Charles are brothers, but not by blood, but that doesn’t make their bond any lesser.) Etc….

…I may also have some cute commissioned artwork to share next week ;) till then!