Hi, everyone. Welcome to another week's developer's diary.
This week's focus is mainly on a sequence of battles that will happen inside the last location of the Black Pyramid. Before you enter the room, you will get a warning that this may be a point of no return depending on your previous choices. This is of course not the end of the game's main story as there are still many chapters beyond the story of Egypt. However, it may still lead to a large area getting locked depending on your choices.
As once you've entered this area, you will have no way to get out until everything is over. Thus, even though every day's progress is updated to the game, the entrance is currently still sealed until everything is done.
Without spoilers, here are something that already goes public on the game's wiki.
There will be a sequence of battles during this part of the story. So far, 4 of them have been implemented. It shall start small with the empowered version of some common enemies that match the story. Then, you will face the Boss character with unique game mechanics.

Also, some nodes to another villain in another game, another time.
Here is an example of the mechanics. In one of the battles, the high priest will start to gather shade power when his HP is below a certain threshold. You will have a few turns to defeat him before he can start to unleash something devastating. There are a few different ways to overcome him. You can go straight to defeat him. You can try to stun him to stop him from harvesting more power. Of course, you can also use spells such as "immutable" to make you unkillable for a short period of time no matter the damage. But, that is unsustainable. The point is, there is no single correct answer. Through your creativities, you can have different strategies to play this game the way you want.
But, what about rewards?
One thing obvious is you can eventually find a way to create liquified shades based on the study in this lab. Maybe, under controlled microdose, you too can find a way to harvest the power of shade while somehow still retaining your sanity. Well, that's just a big maybe. Depending on your definition of sanity, maybe you will come to the conclusion that everyone else is mad instead. Just a warning, no benefits from getting shade corruption have been implemented at this moment. Thus, it may not be a good idea to start your experimentation right away. There is much more to come.
Of course, this week's update is not all about fighting a supervillain in his underground bunker or trying to create some evil substance for the power. We have other more generic updates that benefit everyone.
From the programming side, some functions of the skill window have been rewritten to make it work much better with a mouse or a controller; an optimization path has been taken in the crafting window so that no more FPS drop shall happen.
From customization of the gaming experience point of view, the enemies will now have their ballistic damage resistance reduced in combat difficulty lower than lv4. Starting from lv4 all the way to lv0, the enemies will only have 90%, 70%, 50%, 30%, and 10% of their ballistic damage resistance. For people who want a much-relaxed gaming experience, this change allows them to go all the way gun blazing, and face-roll over many enemies in the game without thinking too much about other tactical choices such as spells, items, and special effects.
From the point of love, you can now pet a lot more kinds of pets from your menu. Some will have additional sound effects. Show your love, and they will stay highly loyal to you. Previously, you can only pet cats and dogs. Now you can pet almost all organic animals.
From the life of quality point of view, you can now load the quicksave without going to the savefile lists.
That's for this week. We are still progressing toward the "sea."
One more thing, the Steam Summer Sale is next week. Have fun! :)
Today's changelog:
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[Crafting]Added the blueprint of Liquified Shade.
[Item]New item: Recipe: Liquified Shade.(To be discovered in the High Priest's Lab)
[The High Priest's Lab]Added a laptop that has the recipe to craft liquified shade.
############System#################
[Crafting]Optimized the crafting window. Greatly reduced the call of the refresh function. Item description window shall now only refresh if text change is detected.
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