0.9.0 Update - March 9, 2024

It's been 97 days since my last confession/devlog... Dang - this one took a while and it's a huge update.

The main thing that happened is the new art direction. I'm pretty happy and proud of it. The most striking difference is the new unit art. I used this asset pack as a starting point: https://jayjay99.itch.io/1-bit-portraits 

I love the unsettling nature of some of these portraits - I thought it fit well for my vision of the game as a whole. I did the coloring and altered some a bit.

The new item art is from asset packs by pixeltier: https://pixeltier.itch.io/

It's fun to try and make art from different asset packs fit together, and I'm happy with the result : )

You also might notice that now everything is more or less lined up at the pixel level. This was a long time coming, and took a bunch of work. I was mainly forced to do this because of making positive and negative cell effects more prominent. These have an indicator that sits inside each cell that also overlay unit card. Having all these things lined up correctly was pretty important, or it just looked horrible. 

I also tried to inject a bit of color into the game to give it a bit more life and variety.

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Other than the art, I went for a few mechanical updates. The big one is that now you can distill items. I just felt like that distill spot was calling to be opened up to them - feels good! This necessitated a few small changed to different abilities.

I can't even remember exactly what abilities I changed in this big update, so you'll have to hover and take a look.

A huge balancing thing I did was that I think I finally nerfed summoning enough to not be the dominant strategy. At least I hope so.

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Thanks for playing and I'd love to hear any thoughts on the changes.

~ Mickey