Howdy, friends! Fox here.

Another month, another update. This one is a pretty subtle one at first glance, but believe us, there's reason to be exited.

As mentioned in the last Devlog, we continued the work on the core mechanics of the game, this time giving a lot of love to the art of combat: Big Stick To The Coconut Edition.

The combat system has mostly reached maturity below the hood and now most of the work will be populating and balancing it for the best experience. We had to touch on quite a sizable amount of inter-connecting parts of the game to get this ready and also do some heavy work on save-compatibility, given how much has changed.

The results?

Weapons and equipment are now on the game, functional and upgradeable(Tiers after the first still need balancing!).

The skill system has been finished and you now can switch basic/special actions and up to four passives on every character, as they become unlocked with progress.

You can give focus orders to your fighters, to gang up against specific targets.

Certain skills can now multihit.

Combat actors will now speak during the fight and react to the happenings.

The status effect system has been established, with certain actions resulting in them(Stunning an enemy, so far, but will quickly growth in variety).

Lots and lots of balancing of both formulas and timing as to give a more significant weight to combat.

A bit of animation flair, popups, visual cues and decoration thrown around to give a clearer picture of what is going on during battle.

More technical debt was paid and the system as a whole is getting close to where we want it to be!

In the Art deparment things are gettings fancy:

The first and second tier of weapons has been completed and we're pretty happy with the results and the cheek in the tooltips.

The works has begun on finally showing the player how their actions move along the Enforcer Station, with improvement levels being ilustrated at zooming speeds!

As mentioned before, lots of little visual cues sprinkled around for QoL which really make a difference.

What can you expect of the next version on June?

We believe the work on the combat system will be finished, as will be the balacing for all the fights on chapter 1. Work on some pretty spicy additions to investigations we also hope to get ready for action by then. Weapon upgrades and maybe even getting to finally see your new recruits in action! If we can sneak in a couple new quests for the chapter to tie up the ribbon for it remains to be seen, but we'll put our hearts into it.

The tutorials should be upgraded to account for all changes and investigations given his own.

The targets for Art are to keep eating away at the placeholders in the Base tab, with the Improvements being the main target here.

And anything else we get the chance to squeeze in before the testing period for the next version!

As always, thanks for reading and give the game a go.

Much love, The Thunderbit Team.