Hello again, everybody!

This week, my focus was on Ophelia! She’s finally got a spiffy new sprite!

Modifying Ophelia as an event was a tricky thing from me to sort out. I’ve had to change how she works as an NPC to get her to work with the new Pet system that I added in the last update. For starters, Ophelia will be able to join you as a playable character as early as the start of Chapter 2. However, increasing her Bond Level will no longer change what items she has in stock. That will now change based on story progression, for balance reasons.

Ophelia’s Bond Level can still be increased by sparring with her. And speaking of which, her battles have been modified too.

You can now see what level Ophelia is when fighting her. Her level matches yours and with higher levels comes newer skills that she can use with or against you. This should make her a reliable training buddy throughout the course of the game.

I’m still writing her support conversations, however. This week has been difficult to sit down and  concentrate on drafting dialogue, so I made progress where I could. Adding in newer party members to the game comes with a lot of work to the game’s systems. Things such as individual “most liked food/alcohol” values, date conversations, Pet progress conversations… Several common events need to be tested and updated. While I did create these systems in a manner that makes them easy to update, it’s still rather tedious and requires extensive testing.

But enough complaining from me… I’m going to try and get the remaining conversations for Ophelia done this week and then begin working on the updated Besilly Cathedral. I came up with an interesting idea for the place this week to make revisiting this old location feel fresh once again.

That’s all I have for you this week. Until next time, everyone!