The Boss Bitch

We told you last month that the Hana fight was already designed and programmed well ahead of schedule. This month, we'll explain a little more about what makes her fight unique. A quick refresher on the flow of combat: the goal is to resist the Domme until the timer runs out, but they go through 3 phases in a fight; each of which changes up the attack patterns and art. The key difference is that each of the 3 base Dommes has a specific combat style, but Hana can do it all: offense, defense, buffs and debuffs. This makes it harder to counter her style and will force players to adapt per phase. The scariest part? Testing revealed the most commonly used strat to deal with tough fights and we specifically designed Hana's phase 2 to counter that.

That's not all, folks! Hana will also be the player's first encounter with a mechanic we were initially gonna reserve for DLC chapters: phase effects. In simple terms, this means the Hana fight will have modifiers that are caused by the phase change rather than an in-combat ability. I'll spoil the phase 1 effect for the sake of clarity: Hana starts the fight with a damage buff that lasts several turns. Players cannot prevent this buff unlike normal buffs that are applied by an ability the Domme uses. Phases 2 and 3 have completely different phase effects that set the pace for that part of the fight.

So how difficult is the Hana fight really? Well, I just barely beat her on my first try. I was genuinely one turn away from losing and I could easily have lost, if the attack pattern rng had gone differently. However, I did design the fight, so that's not fair. I knew all her tricks beforehand and went in with a plan. Zee beat her after 3 attempts. Our external testers will give us a better insight into how hard her fight is, but we've added a way to make her fight easier for people who are struggling. After all, we do want everybody to be able to beat the game. We're just gonna make you work for it.

So where are we at right now? As always, it's time for the Roadmap update where you'll notice we've started actively working on the release DLC. Obviously, we'll get more into that next month.


COMPLETED:

• Hana combat art
  
• Ending art: Victory
  

CURRENT:

• Ending art: Failure
  
• Shizuru DLC Stage 1 combat design
  
• Shizuru DLC Prologue and Stage 1 writing
  
• Music