Hey - Dev Here,

We have a lot of nice things to talk about. Tomorrow starts the A MAZE festival in Berlin and we’ll be there showing Waifu around. And to make sure that everybody gets something, the new demo build is also online.

This version comes with some nice changes and bugfixes. So here is a list of a few things:

• Crafting now uses Poneh Zen
• Redesigned all items and crafting recipes to get rid of that pesky item grinding
• Added flavor texts and names to all waifus and items
• A lot of small tweaks to the placement of UI elements
• Added a bullet absorb counter under the health bar
• Stamina bar blinks red when you can’t boost or dodge
• Antagonist is a bit worse at dodging bullets
• Tweaked the tutorials to disappear a bit earlier
• Dialogs do not repeat when playing a level multiple times
• Reduced that confusing level info menu to a bare minimum

On the technical side we had to do this, which took a long time:

• Overhaul of the entire UI code to make it easier to set up
• Overhaul of the dialog code to make it easier for us to build new dialogs
• And of course we needed to implement Poneh Zen
• Some design basics for visual novel style character art for dialogs

I am not able to keep the old save games intact. The changes with the items and the new crafting system is such a huge change, that I have no clue how to convert the old stuff into the new stuff. So all I can do is apologize and maybe post a gif of the funny man offering an egg in these trying times. I will try to find a solution for that issue and future updates.

So, what’s next? Over the many months we got a lot of really good feedback (and sometimes we watch your videos on Youtube), which gave us a super long list of tasks. They range all over UI improvements, difficulty, visuals and gameplay.

Diegetic House This seems to be the biggest issue from all the reports. The house is cool but way too big and the idea to have the house as the menu to handle waifus and equipment looks good on paper but not so much in practice. To reduce the size of the house and be less confusing we wanna drop the diegetic approach and just give you proper menus. We will keep a lot of the things in the house, because they are wonderful visualizations for your current setup and a good way for quick access to info without opening a menu all the time. The menus themselves will be great for tutorials and navigating the house. And if you feel like it, you can just fly around and talk with the waifus.

Visual Style Dialogs Another thing we learned from talking and watching gameplay is that the waifus really need a proper presence in the house. Because of that we spent so much time the last months to streamline our tools to create dialogs and prepared the UI to handle more character art. We also had the chance to play a few dialog heavy games and they showed us that the current texts are so reduced, they don’t really have that nice flair. That means we want to have proper dialogs for level one to five (the demo), teasing a few of the story arcs and give the waifus finally the presence they need.

When these two things are done, we will take the first five levels and overhaul the unlocking mechanics and implement that the monsters are bigger on higher difficulty levels. We drop more info on this when we start working on it. Until then we try to deliver more updates. The visual style dialogs are quite modular and can be implemented step by step alongside the dialogs. The menus in the house - well, they could be mean, but with some luck we also replace things step by step. So you don't need to wait five more months for the next update.

So - this was a long post. I have to focus the next few days on the A MAZE, so I will be very quiet on the discord server and be unable to react to issues until next week. Until then - have a good one.