Arena of Suffering News

[p]It's the 13th, which means that Next Fest begins today. I hope people find a ton of new games to check out and look forward to. I'll be around if people need anything for my game, and I'll certainly be looking for wishlists of my own (even if I don't have enough time to play the stuff I already have, lol). :)[/p]

[p]I put a few more of our monsters on the main store page for a bit of fun. I had so much fun making all of them during development that I'm seriously hankering to get back into that. I think that was my favorite part in Arena.[/p][p][/p][p]In between the various Steam setups and emails these days, I've been thinking about what elements should be improved in the future. I'm almost done with a dedicated character generation system. We went with an in-game one for Arena, and it works. It's solid. But, I got a couple of comments that a dedicated system would be better/more fun/etc. So, that's a thing that I decided to do.[/p]

[p]I've been trying to update the shop system (on a totally safe build that never goes live). And you know what--it's incredibly hard. Harder than our graphic overhaul, harder than making a basic particle system, tougher than weather. I just don't know why shops are so hard to do well. It's been kicking my butt royally. Message me if anyone has ideas on how to make this easier. Either way, there's no way it'll make Next Fest and it's probably next GAME material anyway, lol.[/p][p]In more fun news, I wanted to show off one of the bosses from our Demo. This is the first handsome fellow that you'll go up against in a serious fight. He's a brute, but he loves puns and can't be all bad.[/p][p][/p]

[p]Only 7 more days until Next Fest! I updated our screenshots and Title page with more recent artwork, and I'm really happy with it. The old intro screen had always seemed thematically fine with me but a bit bland. This one pops more.[/p]

[p]Only 12 more days until Next Fest. Our testers didn't have any trouble with the demo (please drop me a line if anyone else does!). I'm hoping that we'll be able to spend some time developing new plugins while we wait for our publishing date. Does anyone have requests for things that they'd want to see in either an expansion post-release or in the next game that I make? My biggest personal push has been to make a new weather system, and progress on that is going very well. I don't think it's something that'll make it into Arena, but anything we do after this should have more than the basic rain/snow that's built into RPGM MZ. Right now we have spores, dust, sandstorms, and fog too. Fun stuff![/p]