Himeko Sutori News

We had been concerned about cluttering the community page with too many updates if we post patch notes every day we fix something. But it looks like Steam now offers a "minor patch notes" option. We'll use these from now on and see how it goes.

Over the last couple of days we added the following:

• Improved particle effect, fixed sound effect for the Windstone alchemist weapon
  
• Fixed damage popups and health bar when gates or other obstacles take damage
  
• No more moving, then attacking a gate when 0 movement points remain
  
• Added blocking volumes to several indoor levels to prevent falling out of the level
  
• New Shadowlands theme music by Kevin Won added to Shadowlands playlist
  
• Added palace interior to Al-Ramliyah
  
• Fixed scrapper wall quest
  
• Added the beginning of the quest to investigate problems at the House of Life
  

A few of you have been asking for the option to rebind keys. Before, you would have to edit a settings file. Now, you can just set up your preferred keys in-game through the options menu.

I've tested it and I think everything is working. But if you come across any problems, please let me know so I can fix it.

Thanks for your help!

Sorry for the long radio silence. We've been working on something really big: fully working sieges with walls and gates. We also spent some time on Google trying to find a better term (the siege is technically what you do in order to avoid battle, and a real siege sounds pretty boring), but since most other games call storming-the-castle levels sieges, we will too.

You wouldn't believe how much we had to rework in order to get this all to work. Pathfinding through the gate, AI deciding whether to attack the gate or go around it, letting attacks target an obstacle instead of an enemy lance, changing the node from a gate to a regular node after destruction, and on and on.

But it's all working now!

We also completely redid Sunrise Gate Outpost, the first settlement you find in the Shadowlands. We're going to be doing a lot more work to some other old areas in order to make them more interesting and important to the plot.

We'd like to get your input on the battle for Sunrise Gate Outpost: Are there too many enemies? Do the walls' defensive and offensive bonuses seem right?

We wanted to make this first siege a little simple, but we'll throw in some more complicated sieges in later levels.

We're getting back to work now. We have some more cutscenes to script and important battles to set up. And we'll try fixing the worst of the bugs you come across. We're probably going to slow down on adding new features until the game's plot is finished. If we can just focus on completing the plot, we think we can have move out of Early Access in November.

Also, we may be implementing some price increases soon. We had an idea of how much we would like to charge for the game, and the Early Access price is lower than that in order to entice players to help us with an incomplete game. Now that we're rolling toward completion, we're going to start moving the price up to what we had originally planned. So if you had been on the fence about buying Himeko Sutori, you might want to pick it up now.

That's it for the news right now. We'll be back soon with more developments for you.

We had another busy month here, posting almost daily (sometimes more than once daily) patches with new content and bug fixes. Mostly we added a lot of new content, fleshing out the mid-game with tons of new equipment, enemies, and battle maps.


Some of you may have noticed that the battles have gotten a lot tougher. Enemies outside the starting area now have bigger armies, more levels, and better equipment. Keep a close eye on the difficulty meter before you go into battles and be cautious before venturing into any caves or dungeons.


To prepare for the upcoming battles, you should check out the equipment vendors in all the towns you visit. Most types of weapons and armor now have five tiers. (And some may have six or seven before we're done.) Only a few of the dozens of new items are shown here.

We altered the vendors' inventories to give you access to better equipment sooner. As a side-effect of adding all this new equipment, your monster classes (which don't use weapons or armor) will be underpowered. We're working to fix that. Crafting will also be less useful for a little while until we can add more recipes to keep crafted weapons a step above off-the-shelf weapons.


We added several new battle maps this month to add some more variety to the battles. You can find this ruined hilltop town in the Shadowlands.


There's also a new desert map, the lava map you saw at the top of this post, and a new grassland map.

And we did all of this in addition to fixing more bugs than we can count.

We think the game has been fleshed out enough for us to start adding more story elements again. In August we'll try to script more encounters to move the plot along.

Thank you everyone for your continuing interest in Himeko Sutori! We hope to have more updates for you soon.

We've been posting almost daily updates, but it's probably time to write patch notes for what we've added over the last week or so.

We added sprite sheets for the Tenshot, Mordo Blaster, Mesmer Sphere, Forest Master Bow, Vigilant Hammer, and Electrozapper. We haven't tested all of those weapons yet, so please let us know if there are any problems with their sprites. You can get the latest weapons from the vendor at the top of the Icy Reach.

There's a new battle map, the Lava Cave, accessible from the lava world map. Right now it just spawns the regular skeletons that you can fight in the Abandoned Mines. We'll change the enemies you see there soon.

We also fixed some materials that were not being affected by time of day, fixed some text boxes, and made some enemy armies tougher.

Please let us know if you see any bugs with the new additions or anything else!