Hi, everyone. Welcome to another developer's diary that is totally not about the Philosopher's Stone, instead, it's about the Stone Philosophers.
With the opening of the Floor of Philosophy in the Grand Library, you now have a chance to talk to those Statues of Philosophers, along with some corrupted books on this floor.
By talking, I mean they will use quite a lot of speech-based combat skills to attack you, causing emotional damage.
One of those skills is the newly added "Kenga Speech" which can cause damage based on the user's speech skill levels and stun targets. The name of this skill originated from the Chinese/Japanese word "懸河" to describe someone with extraordinary debating skills to support their points with endless arguments and an enormous vocabulary of words like the flow of rivers. Coincidently, it's also an Indian name for girls with the meaning the river. It may also be considered related to the horned deity "Ikenga" worshipped by people living in Southeastern Nigeria, a deity that encourages people to pursue greatness. If we keep digging, we can find it's also the name of a Fintech company located in modern-day South Africa. Isn't that fascinating that people all around the world with different cultures and language backgrounds are using this word? Whether this is evidence of the human collective unconscious or the remaining memory before the destruction of the Tower of Babel is another topic to study later.
With new enemies, it also comes with new rewards. To start with, you can turn those Statues of Philosophers into your pets and use their speech skills and speech-based combat skills to benefit you in your journey in this supernatural world. Should you decide to destroy them and the corrupted books come with them, the loot is also good. You can find stones, curse stones, skill books, spell books, crafting recipes, religious books, and scrolls from them.
Talking about scrolls, we just got some new scrolls this week as well.
Well, the parody is quite obvious.
The Scroll of Objection! with a red figure pointing a finger forward is a scroll that can give a character the "objection!" effect that can reflect all incoming emotional damages from skills for one turn.
In both of the Chinese versions, the effect is using the Japanese words from where the easter egg coming from.
The Scroll of Paradox, with a platypus that has not yet become a fossil on it, can cause confusion among enemies.
Meanwhile, some progress has been made in the main story. The Path to the Black Pyramid is now accessible. A document left by one of the missing professors, illustrating their unfortunate journey can also be found in the otherworldly version of the Desert of the Trapped. But, as always, I am not going to spoil too much about the story here.
Now, let's talk about another a bit more serious topic. Have you ever questioned the meaning of your common daily life? What's all that about when you go to work/school every day and repeat? What's all that about when I update this game every day and write a developer's diary every week? Most of us, are common people that may be forgotten in history one day. Most of what we did for decades may never be known to most other people just like this almost 19-year-old game. Such is absurd of life. Maybe nothing will ever change after all that you and I have done. But, will you just give up? Here is my answer:
You can find the "Le Mythe de Sisyphe" of Camus on the Floor of Philosophy.
Today's changelog:
############Content#################
[Effect]New effect: Objection! (Reflect 100% incoming emotional damage from skills)
[Item]New item: Scroll of Objection!
[Item]Scroll of Item Illusion can now be recycled into paper.
[Loot]Statue of Philosopher may now drop Scroll of Objection!
[The Path to the Black Pyramid]Added some stairs and decorations. More parts of this area are accessible.
[The Path to the Black Pyramid]Added shade enemies on the 2nd floor of the path. They will not leave this area.
############System#################
Added a function to get all accessible tiles from a certain point of the map.
Added a module to cache calculated map area data.
############Debug##################
Fixed a bug that acid element-related special attribution may not display in item description windows.
Fixed a bug that Scroll of Paradox can only be used once per battle.
