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[Ingenoire]

Meet Memo! God of Memory! The only person in the Underworld who’s willing to give Persephone a hand… for a price.

He’s the one who initially helped out Persephone before her three knights came to the rescue. Memo is a freelancer and is in for the Pleuros, as at the time that Persephone was being chased, she was carrying a lot of Pleuros. He proposed his services of replaying previous experiences for a different outcome from contract date, and Persephone spent all the pleuros she carried with her… thinking it was time travel. Since her title was already stolen by the time of the contract, she couldn’t play back before the title was stolen. She did feel scammed…

Memo is sticking with helping Persephone during the game’s events, simply because it’s more profitable for him to get the rightful leader of the underworld back on their throne.

Memo can propose many services, and wanders worlds through the use of the Save Room, a special room that can be accessed through Save Doors that he can create to go to places.

REPLAY MISSIONS

As part of the contract with Persephone, Memo can allow you to replay older missions for completion sake, like getting the missing stolen titles and treasures chests, or just if you want to grind a bit. This service was paid for.

From this screen, you can also play the current mission. Checkmarked missions means they are completed, while exclamation mark missions mean it is the next story mission needed to be completed.

SAVING
MEMO’S SAVE DOORS

Memo’s second service is a saving feature. It will allow the team to record their exploits and log them into a historical database. In the field, Memo will try to create Save Doors for you to access and save your game, but only manages to do it on more longer missions… In the intermission, you can save your game as well. This service was also paid for…

MEMOPEDIA
MEMO’S PERSONAL ENCYCLOPAEDIA

Memo’s third service is of maintaining an encyclopaedia, called Memopedia. It is the database he maintains. It contains lots of data of various creatures, locations, events, titles… You can consult the Memopedia at any time on the field or in the intermission. Memo actually wants you to log as many foes and titles as possible!

After unlocking Memopedia access, you will also unlock a scan feature in battle. Using it on an unregistered foe will register them in the Memopedia, and will also show you their current HP. Once an enemy has been scanned, their current health will always be visible in subsequent battles.

SHOP
YOUR ONLY SHOP

The last service Memo provides you is a shop! Persephone is unable to visit any shop in the Underworld: it will lead her to being captured. Memo proposes to get items, flowers, and even some stolen titles from the Underworld Markets, but at an inflated price. Memo needs Pleuros, after all. In addition, you can also sell flowers and items. The shop is only accessible from the Intermission, so remember to visit by before your next mission!

—

Quick note: a lot of pictures in this post are unfinished and have incomplete data.

Next week, there might not be an update: the reason is because I’m going to be making sure the data from the now usable editor works correctly in the game! It’s going to take a bit of time, but the actual contents of the game (items, flowers, titles, missions, etc…) will be written through the editor.

[Ingenoire]

Leader Lock Zones!

I’m trying out something new this week. If it doesn’t seem to work out, I’ll return to somewhat regular weekly updates. In this format, I focus on a single feature at a time, with updates not always on Saturday.

When you explore the missions of Hegemone Pass, you’ll be interacting with a few gimmicks in the world that might hinder or help your progress in the mission. Today, we’ll be looking at the Leader Lock Zones, a strange area that forces your leader to switch to the leader matching the color of the zone. In addition, while inside this zone, you cannot switch your leader!

When you enter a red Leader Lock Zone, you can only play as Yvonne.

Go in a blue zone and you’re locked as Ethan, and in a yellow zone as Emilie.

The HUD will also display a lock icon when you are leader locked!

Purposes
These zones have two intended purposes. The first reason is to force you to use their abilities to move forward. For example, a red leader lock zone surrounding a breakable rock forces you to try using Yvonne’s Ribbon Axe on the rock to break it. Mostly used for introducing new entities in the world, giving a hint about what character can interact with it.

The second reason would be as an obstacle. If a red or blue leader lock zone surrounds a fast conveyor belt going in the wrong direction, you are not able to use Emilie to outrun the conveyor, since you are not able to even use Emilie in that zone. Yvonne and Ethan can’t outrun this fast conveyor belt, so there is no way to go ahead…

However, you can deactivate leader lock zones if there are switches! To get by certain leader lock zones that act as obstacles. While disabled, you can switch leaders inside the field to use their abilities. If the zone goes back on while inside, you’ll switch back to the forced leader immediately.

Lastly, you need to avoid entering battle inside one of these zones. If you do fight inside one of them, your team will be unable to switch leaders inside the battle! Depending on your equipped titles and your current leader, it might be a big disadvantage, so exercise caution!

[Taxis]

You have an amazing game in your hands. The character design is great too, so much style.

Good work!

[Ingenoire]

Woah there! Great news! (and priority changes)

There was an unexpected Siliconera article that popped up! I did not send any Press Release, FYI.

Check it out here: http://www.siliconera.com/2016/10/01/hegemone-pass-turn-based-rpg-cute-knights-underworld-power/

It's nice that an article has been written! However, I must work on a Press Release ASAP, alongside a trailer, so that journalists have a clear idea about what the game is about and help them write about the game more easily. The game appearing in a larger space other than game dev forums / twitter does require me to take more caution with what I release (I don't want unfinished material passing off as finished, for example)... The Press Release will be an attempt to showcase the gameplay and the special properties of the leader switching and titles mechanic through the trailer, with the text being reviewed to make sure I can get the message accross clearly. One idea is a Super Smash Bros % Ejection Comparaison shot-like scene in the trailer for showcasing the effects of the different titles.

This means I got to work on my writing, making sure I can convey the necessary information clearly.

The website will also be updated with the new PR. Certain small details have changed, and certain screenshots have outdated tiles or UI elements.

This is a very sudden update. This whole week I'm working full time at work (not much rest), but from next week I'll be able to resume regular work on the game. Updates are going to slow down: the press release material is going to take the highest priority (it was already high enough, but the article does push the urgency of doing it).

This is also going to force me to decide on the music composer, and if possible, the promotional artist.

TL;DR: Siliconera posted about our game! Since I did not send a Press Release, but it's out there on a big site, the top priority is to get a Press Release and trailer written, to clear any confusion and help out the writters when writing about the game.

[Ingenoire]

Been a while!

Currently, I've been working on a lot of different things, but all towards one goal: to get a trailer/press release done. One good thing is that the Database Editor is useable, and I can create content much easier than before. There are still a few things to iron out, but the game takes the data correctly now.

There are other things I did, but a lot of it is mostly backend. A few things, like field damage counters, are shown in my latest post on the website.

Hopefully, I'm expecting to get the all this done near end November. Hopefully. I also need to decide on a composer, as the trailer will require music.

[torcado]

woowww this flat color style is

[Ashedragon]

I'm loving that chapter card sequence!

[Ingenoire]

Long time no see! I've posted a new blog post today! To summarize, the game is now entering content development. Also, this means I can go from 10% to 20% on the TIGsource progress bar thingy. Neat!

Check out the blog post for more details on the changes, I'm a bit too lazy to copy and paste all the images into imgur...
--> BLOG POST <--

Quick summary
First of all, I am terribly sorry for not having posted anything formal on the devlog. I had a two month period where I had a lot of real-life work to do, and the rest of the time during this silence was doing a lot of backend, such as bug fixing, and optimization here and there. Most importantly, I've also completed during that time both an attack choreography editor (battle animations) and a cut-scene editor, to speed up their creation.

Amongst the new changes, I've redone how intermissions works: they now act like a mini hub stage! You can talk with your allies here and access all the features of the intermission.

You also get to play as Persephone, not within one of your party members, during Intermission.

A few services in Intermission also got a bit of a rework, such as the Mission Select!

Other things were added, like a stat/buff/debuff viewer during battle.

And a few field gimmicks, like the Gravity Minotaur Beam.

Again, sorry for the silence. The other changes are listed on the blog, but now I'm on track to create the contents of the game.

[Pineapple]

This art is amazing, especially the character art. It's so hard to make pixel art work stylistically at higher resolutions, but this is perfect.

[Ingenoire]

Hello!

Yesterday, I wrote a post on the main website about enemy spawners, more specifically, the different iterations it went through. You can check that out here:

--> BLOG POST <--

To summarize, the game went from a Paper Mario style of spawning enemy encounters, into a more traditional random enemies on the field mechanic, inspired by Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE. It's the first time I write this kind of article, focusing on the game design and so on, rather than just keeping people up to date. I might try writing other posts in this vein...

The enemy radar was recently introduced to warn players in advance when enemies are going to spawn. Also recently introduced, the Lightshine item! Used on field, it closes all portals and scares away all foes for a few steps, resetting the radar along the way!

(Sorry, the menu UI is still a bit broken after bitmaptext conversions)

I also created button icons for keyboard and joypad buttons, fixing the keybind screen along the way, and making it so that changes are only applied if you select the apply button.

The last change I wanted to point out was that the game now shows when selecting a target if they are weak against the selected attack during battle! It will be very useful for battle where the enemy can switch between multiple leaders carrying team or leader titles that grant resistances or weaknesses.

I do post a lot more often (sometimes minor things) on Twitter (here), but I just wanted to post a few things that I pushed on twitter lately. If a lot of small minor updates occur on twitter, I'll probably do small compilation posts here from time to time.

Thanks for reading!

[Ingenoire]

Hello! Another post has just been posted to the main blog!

--> BLOG POST <--

To summarize...

Challenge Battles have been implemented! Find a Challenge Gate, enter it and fight a battle with special conditions to earn special prizes that will be useful for your journey! Losing a challenge does not result in a game over, and can be instantly retried if failed.

There are locked doors and the key system that was in the game as a mission objective has now been changed to act like normal keys! Keys only exist within a mission, and don't take any inventory space.

Lastly, new animation for obtaining a Persephone power.

[Ingenoire]

Wow, it's been a really long time since I last posted on the devlog! I even forgot to post the last update that was in June!

Mastery System


I've introduced the mastery system to titles, and I did a bit of UI changes in battle.
So what's mastery? Basically, it's a sort of EXP for titles. After every battle, your team gains not only EXP, but mastery points as well.

A title has three levels of mastery, with level 1 being a freshly obtained title:

• LEVEL 2 Mastery: Improves the buffs/debuffs for the title.
• LEVEL 3 Mastery: Immediately restores 1 SP when the owner of this title becomes the current leader.
• FULL Mastery: Exclusive technique usable when the owner of the title has it equipped.

When a title is fully mastered, the owner of the title now gets a rank up!

Rank System


Each party member now has a rank. You improve their rank by mastering titles for each character.
Getting ranks unlocks permanent upgrades for that character, such as...

• A technique
• 1 Point of SP Refresh, the amount of SP restored every time the character's turn comes up in battle.
• Drop rate increase, etc...

Turn Order Update


Previously, the game was a very traditional turn based rpg, where you could select each party member's moves before the turn began, and every actor on the field would act based on their speed.

Now, it's been changed to something more like Persona, where you only decide their action when it's their turn. It's more useful for the leader switching mechanic, both for the player and the AI, also it let's the AI be more reactive to changing situations with relatively little changes to the AI code.


All the stuff mentioned on top is a quick summary of the website's post, here.


The New Flower System


This is the subject of yesterday's post on the website.

I wanted to make the flower equipments a bit more interesting, and easier to make content wise. The old system of creating each flower, with each one having unique stats and a technique, was rather tedious.

The new system has several characteristics for each flower:

• A Colour
• A Brightness Rating
• And a technique

Essentially, there is a synergy system between the three flowers you can equip for each character, and the way they synergize is based on their colour. Synergizing improves the power of the equipped flowers, but their power is based on their brightness. A bright flower has great power, but poorly improves the other flowers, while a dark flower has poor power, but greatly improves the other flowers.

I go into a bit more detail on the flowers and synergy here.

Tiled! :D


Some good news, and recent news too! I've changed the level editor from OGMO to Tiled, and it is going to make my life much easier making maps! The amount of lag there was in OGMO for any map larger than a house was horrendous! Tiled has it's minor problems, but definately much more usable than OGMO.

The biggest thing I miss from ogmo is the enum variable, absent from tiled, but I just preformat my entities with defined strings as "value1|value2|value3...", and modify the property when I place one in the map.



I'm still working on the game, I just had some personal problems. See you soon!

[Joh]

Can I say your game looks amazing?
A very nice style and even all the HUD and menu look slick.
jrpg and platformer?
pretty cool, keep it up!

(Seriously though, I was sure I was already following this, but apparently not. so here; post to follow.)

[Ingenoire]

Another really long time passed, due to some real life issues. Development slowed down to a crawl, but now things should be
back on track, and I can finally get moving to doing the actual content.

The blog was updated, so you can read what's new there: check it out here!

Newer Timeline System


There is first of all a new timeline system. It relies heavily on the speed stat, which dictates how fast they move on the timeline. Titles that affect speed are of great use with this system.
If you are fast enough, you can perform your action before the enemy was supposed to. Another thing is that weaknesses and resistances from team and leader titles now can move the target's position in the timeline further back (if you hit a weakness) or bring it closer to the front (hitting a resistance).

Small Numbers, Additive Titles & Flowers


Another change is the smaller numbers for stats, titles and flowers. Because of this, titles now grant an additive boost in stats, rather than a percentage boost. Flowers have been altered and now the bouquet synergy system now gives additive boost rather than a percentage boost.



Other things include some particle effects for the titles, a change to the intermissions, and the Hegemone Pass now becoming a free action in battle. More details can be found on the blog post.

Hopefully, I'm back on track, and I'll try to be more active. In the past week, I've done the prototype map designs for about 8 main missions, almost 1/3rd of the intended main missions.

[Bricabrac]

Glad to see the project is still alive! Looking great 

[Ingenoire]

Hello!

I've returned from my slumber in the Underworld once again to bring to you the first trailer of the game!

In addition to this trailer, the website has been "relaunched" with a better design, alongside a press kit and more! You can check it out at http://hegemonepass.com! Also, the devlog's front page has been edited with newer pictures, but it's not done fully. It's mostly a press release at this point.

Lastly, I've opened a page for anyone who wants to register for an early bird test demo, to get some earlier feedback before the demo gets released to the public. Check it out here! It will be out sometime later.

Please watch the trailer, and tell me what you think about it!

[Ingenoire]

Another day in the Underworld… and now, there's Stealth Gameplay!



Yes, it's now a Stealth JRPG!

In Hegemone Pass, stealth now has some importance: getting spotted will trigger a Hunt on you, where enemies will come out from their homes to hunt you down and gain the rewards. However, it isn't the end of the world. It is still a JRPG. Battles will be tougher if fought during a Hunt, as the % timer now acts as a +% boost to the enemy team's titles.

You are still required to defeat enemies to gain EXP, so avoiding battles isn't the goal here. Also, be careful of enemy reinforcements when engaging large groups of enemies on the field!

You get more EXP when stealthy, but you'll get more Title Mastery fighting while Hunted.



For those who are bad at stealth, fear not, as it's not the sole way of playing: exploit the incompetence of your enemies, and Demeter will not waste any more of her powers on the incompetent locals, and will abandon them, launching a state of Hubris where enemies run away from you and lots of EXP can be gained from enemies without leaders or titles.



Unlike other stealth games, the leader who grants her power, Demeter, can be seen, and has moods that can alter the way the Hunt goes. Sometimes it's a weaker Hunt because she's crying (where the enemy who spotted you must reassure her), a Hunt where Demeter is absolutely angry and will overclock the timer to 300%... before instantly going to -100%... or the enemy simply being unable to pray properly, not reaching the goddess to warn her of your presence.



This is only one aspect of the game that got updated, as sometime later, I'll be covering all the other updates to the game, most notably an improved timeline system in battle which is easier to understand and leads to more interesting battles…

I've written more details of this system on the blog. You can check it here:

More Information on the Stealth HERE!

Thanks for reading, and sorry for the massive silence (again). It's pretty tough, but hopefully, things are accelerating once more!

[Ingenoire]

Hi TigSource!



The v0.9, RC1 Demo has released! It's available for both Windows and Linux!

Download the Demo!

Inside the demo, you'll be experiencing a "pilot" like episode of sorts that takes various elements of the main script to form a quick establishment of the plot.

On the same page as the download, you'll find a feedback survey. Please fill it in! We need a lot of feedback to make sure the demo's prime and ready to go for our upcoming Kickstarter! We'll also place this demo on the tigSource playtesting board, so that we get as much feedback as possible!

Many of the game's features are at least showcased in one way or another in this demo: the mission based structure, the battle system, shop, stealth, leader titles… And there's even a boss at the end!

We hope you enjoy the demo, and look forward to our upcoming Kickstarter! It should begin early May!

[Ingenoire]

Hello TIGSource! Here's some great news!

We've just launched the Hegemone Pass Kickstarter!

Check out the Kickstarter!

Alongside a new trailer...

In addition, we've launched v1.0 of the demo. This is a large update of the previous demo, and includes a script rewrite, difficulty rebalance, and much more.

You can find the new demo here!

Oh! And don't forget, if you try out the demo, please help us out and fill in the survey.

Give feedback on the demo!

(The feedback helps us out!)

Now... I need to go and start writing press releases, update the press kit, send some emails, etc...

See you on Kickstarter!

[Ingenoire]

Hey tigSource!

A new version of the demo has been uploaded! v1.21 addresses some user feedback and implements a new mechanic, Miasma Swift!

The Miasma Swift lets you lay down a trail of Miasma. Standing in the miasma makes you both invisible and intangible to foes. You can use two modes:

• STEALTH MODE: Lays down the miasma for a longer period of time, allowing you to avoid enemies and get through tight spots. This uses 1 Miasma Point.
• TELEPORT MODE: Teleport to the desired destination (including through walls!). The miasma disappears very quickly, and uses 3 Miasma Points.

The game resolution has also been increased. Some hidden spots have been added, the game difficulty has been increased, and a few more changes.

You can find the new demo here!

Here's some pictures:






Oh, and we've got about 11 days left on our Kickstarter. Only 4% of our goal! (We might make it to 5%!)