It's all in the title, gamers! This week, I'm going to show you a bunch of improvements we've made to Blanksword that all aim to make it smoother, easier to understand and (you guessed it) saucier than ever before!

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Slicker Battles

One of the recurring issues we've met in our internal playtests is that Blanksword is a fairly complex game. The Battles involve a lot of moving parts, there's a ton of different effects that can occur and there's basically a giant charcuterie board of icons and UI elements on the screen most of the time.
We haven't spared our efforts in making sure that players are not overwhelmed by the game, but on the contrary have a pleasant, intelligible and digestible experience.

A big problem point that we identified was that enemies were hard to understand: their attacks, effects and patterns could be hard to follow and the internal logic to their behavior was very hard to discern. To help with this, we've given all our enemies little preview icons (left of their HP bar) that lets you know what kind of Move they're going to perform on their next turn.
You don't have perfect information (though there may be a Brain Part in the works that could change that 👀) , but you'll know whether you're about to get attacked, or if your enemies are likely to protect themselves or prepare something, and you can strategize accordingly!

The other big issue we worked on was keeping track of the game's Status Effects: there really needed to be a strong, consistent visual indication that your enemy just gave itself a rare Buff or that BLANK just received some godawful messed-up imaginary disease (Blanksword has like 4 of these at this point), so we created just that. It's still a work in progress, but here's a quick and dirty snippet of how it is right now: clear, concise messages tthat let you keep track of what's happening at a glance.

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More Tutorialisation

A good RPG needs good tutorial material, and it also needs a Glossary that you can consult at any time to stay refreshed on the game's mechanics! After many tribulations, we're getting to a pretty good place. In the game menus, you can consult your Library to learn about Blanksword's systems and knick-knacks.
For instance, every Moveset (the main families of Moves that Blanksword can use in Battle) has its own page that summarizes how its main gimmick works and provides some observations. Who wrote these? Maybe you'll find out as you play the game :]

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Downhill + Mortis Guest

This has nothing to do with the previous topic, but Downhill, a wonderful action RPG from Sisterhood Games with a unique 4th-wall-breaking twist, has recently done us the honor to give us a shoutout in their newsletter! Downhill was recently funded on Kickstarter and it's a wonderfully unique game that I'm personally very excited to play! I can only recommend that you check their demo out!

I also wanted to announce it here for those that missed the posts we made on our socials: Mortis Ghost will be an official guest in our Kickstarter Campaign! For those of you that somehow don't know about it, Mortis is the creator of an indie cult classic called "OFF", which was the starting point of Quinn (our lead developer)'s career in games when she translated it into English.
If the Kickstarter Campaign goes well, Mortis will do us the privilege of working with us on designing an area of Blanksword! Needless to say, we've all been buzzing like bees about it - OFF is a very important game for many of us in the dev team and I'm personally still finding it hard to believe that I might work with someone that made something so important to me.

And if you didn't know, OFF's Remake is coming out this August on PC & Switch, so if you haven't played it, you're in luck :]

That's all for me today! Thank you for the love and encouragements you've sent our way and please consider spreading the word about our Kickstarter Page if you want to support the project, it's not mandaatory but it aalways helps a lot!

Virtual headpats,
Leaf