Hello everyone!

In this week's devlog, we'll detail another system tied to the missions: the Guild Upgrades system.

As mentioned in the previous devlog, the world is divided into 5 different regions. Upgrades can be built into any of these 5 regions and will confer a variety of bonuses, primarily to that region.

After selecting the Upgrades section in the Guild, the player can decide in which region they want to build upgrades for. Selecting a region will show it on the world map, show which battle maps are tied to it and which upgrades are currently built on there.


Afterwards, the player can build upgrades for the region, or reset current upgrades for the region.


Resetting the upgrades will refund a portion of their cost and clear all upgrades from the area, so the player can change their layout if they feel like it. On that screen, the player can see the layout for the selected region and the currently built upgrades if there are any. Each region has its own layout for adding buildings. This example has a 3x4 area to add buildings. Other regions will have different areas, such as a 3x3 or perhaps a 2x3 and a 1x3, etc.

Selecting to build a new upgrade will show the list of all possible upgrades the player could create as well as their cost in CP (Company Points). There will be a core of buildings that will be the same for all regions, but some regions will have unique buildings that confer special bonuses or bonuses that pertain to the specific zone better (things tied to poisonous maps for example).


You can see the bonus for the selected upgrade in its description. These bonuses are divided into 3 general categories:

• Mission Bonuses: these bonuses apply to Mission that are in the same zone as the Upgrade.
  
• Patrol Bonuses: these bonuses apply to Patrols that are in maps that are part of the same zone as the Upgrade.
  
• Global Bonuses: these bonuses apply all the time to all zones. Those are considerably rarer.

On top of this base bonus that a building confers, there's a concept of synergy, where a building can bolster another building if they happen to be touching on the building grid. For example, the Cantina will confer a bonus to the Gardens, the Bounty Board and the Watchtower if they are built side by side. Thus, the grid available in a region (3x3 vs 2x3 for example) will impact what kind of bonuses you could get in that region. And, of course, the player's choices in placing the buildings will also have an impact on that front.

Here's what it looks like when selecting the Gardens, which receives a bonus from the Cantina. It shows what the bonus would be on that building if it was next to a Cantina, in this case "receive 2x as many components from Gathering".


Finally, when selecting a specific upgrade, you will be able to place it where you want in the building grid, assuming you have the CP and the grid position isn't already occupied by another building. As you select a position, the "border bonuses" that will be active will light up to show which would be active from placing the building there and greyed out if they wouldn't currently confer a bonus.


The current building icons were taken from some of our maps and aren't final, but they showcase the visual style we're going for with the buildings.

Currently, there are 24 different building upgrades and each will have its own unique building sprite. Each has their own bonus and many will have synergy bonuses as well. Here are some examples of the bonuses the upgrades will grant:

Missions:

• Missions take 20% less time to complete.
  
• Missions award 20% more CP.
  
• Missions award 2x as many components as normal.
  
• One extra unit can be sent on each mission.
  
• Missions award 20% more AP
  
• …

Patrols:

• While patrolling the region, increase the chance of meeting stray Kawa Bandits 5%
  
• While patrolling the region, increase the chance of meeting stray Zotzits 5%
  
• While patrolling the region, increase damage dealt by player units by 5%.
  
• While patrolling the region, all deployed units will start with Renew.
  
• ...

Global:

• Store prices in any store are 5% cheaper when buying.
  
• Guild prices in any guild are 5% cheaper for all services costing GP.
  
• Can run 1 more mission at the same time.
  
• ...

When combined with the Missions, the Guild Upgrades system should give the player a lot to do outside of battles and help them open up new challenges, areas and rewards.

Feel free to send us comments, ideas, feedback and suggestions!

Thanks for reading!

Hello everyone,

It’s this time of the year when Steam once again organizes the annual Steam Awards where you can vote for your favorite games in multitude of categories.

A lot of great games came out this year (some which we spent more time than we probably should), that deserve your vote and attention but if you consider Fell Seal to be one of those, please consider nominating it in some of the categories. We know that the competition is very hard as there are a lot of great and recognizable titles however every bit of potential visibility helps to introduce the game to new people who may also soak their teeth into the land of Teora and become full-time arbiters!

Hello everyone!

We've been quite busy hammering the designs down for Missions and Monsters, and we've finally reached a point where we feel we have enough details to start our devlog on the creation process.

With each devlog, we'll be focusing on one of the new systems that Missions and Monsters will be adding to Fell Seal. This week, that's missions! But first, a quick refresher on the general scope of the DLC.


Missions and Monsters isn't meant as a continuation of Fell Seal's story, but rather to extend and add to the core systems of the game, as well as add new challenges and content.

As such, the plan is to add a missions system, a guild upgrade system, recruitable monsters, a monster-taming system, monster classes, new encounters, new classes and new crafting recipes. We're also adding large encounters that will feature a lot more combatants on each side, for putting to work more of those units you've been collecting.


The new missions system is wide-reaching and meant to achieve several goals.
It will give more things to do for "benched units", with some missions giving special rewards, opening new content and being a viable method to procure many crafting components. Missions can also serve as an alternative means of earning EXP and AP for benched units, although in that case they tend to yield less impressive loot. Most missions will be repeatable, but some will be unique and award something quite special.

It'll be up to the player to decide which style of missions they want to focus on, as they can only run a limited amount of missions at once.

Missions (and guild upgrades, which we'll cover in a later devlog) are accessed through the Guild menu:

A new resource called Company Points (CP) will be added next to the current GP bar. Currently, CPs are only used to purchase Guild Upgrades, but we're considering adding a cost in CP to run Missions as well.

Once you've selected Missions from the Guild, you need to select the Region in which you want to start a mission. There are 5 Regions in the game and they open up as you unlock new nodes on the world map.

In this screenshot, only the "Centina Hinterlands" region is available and it's still missing 3 nodes to be fully unlocked. All missions have a location node where they take place, and thus won't be available until the given node has been explored by the player on the world map.

After selecting the region, the player can start a mission in that region.

Missions that aren't known yet (because they are locked behind a map node, or because they require a previous mission to be completed, for example) are shown as ??? in the list.

Missions can be in various states: new, in-progress, completed-and-done, completed-and-redoable. They have a different icon depending on their current state. In the example list, they are all "new" or unknown.

Here you can see the rewards of the mission as well as the required participants and how long they last (more info on that later!).

Selecting a valid mission will bring the player to a selection screen to decide which units to send on the mission. Only the units participating in the mission will earn the various rewards, such as AP, EXP, etc.

Story-characters can't be sent on missions and only recruits without an injury can be sent. When a unit is sent on a mission, they won't be available to be deployed in a regular battle map.

Each mission has a minimum and a maximum of participants and the first participant chosen becomes the leader of the mission. Once enough units are selected, the mission can be started.

Once the mission is started, it'll show as "in-progress" in the missions list.

In-progress missions have their own icon and are always sorted at the end of the list for a quick visual identification. Selecting a mission already in progress will allow the player to cancel it if they want to. Cancelling the mission will free up the units that were running it, but no rewards shall be given for the mission.

Currently, the maximum amount of missions that can be run at once is 3, although there is a way to increase that amount via the Guild Upgrades system.

When a mission is in progress, it will take some amount of time to complete, usually 30 mins, although that's something we're still tinkering with. After 30 mins of "real life time" has passed, the mission will be completed and display a result for the endeavor anywhere on the world map.

Mission success is not guaranteed, although the success rate will be tuned to be pretty high in general. There are multiple ways to increase that, including Guild Upgrades and carefully selecting the leader of the mission. The class of the leader will grant them a bonus success rate based on the mission. The description of the mission itself will have clues hinting at which type of class would do well on it. This bonus is only applied to the leader of the mission, to reduce the amount of micro-managing of classes that the player has to do for missions, while still providing some incentive for "thinking about it" rather than just clicking through things. Missions can also have a critical success result, in which case bonus rewards will be granted to the player.

The overall goal of the missions and guild upgrade systems is to create another layer of interesting actions the player can take "outside of combat", with a wide array of goals possible, such as farming AP, EXP, GP or CP, as well as focusing on crafting materials, special rewards or unlocking new content.

It'll be tied to the Guild Upgrade system, which we should cover in our next devlog.

Feel free to send us comments, ideas, feedback and suggestions about the design or the devlog itself!

Thanks everyone!

Hello everyone!

We have a quick update today. Nothing fancy, mostly some minor bug fixes and adding a forgotten portrait.

Here are the full notes:

11/16/2019 - Version 1.1.2

• New Portrait: Adding a forgotten male portrait.
  
• Accessibility: Adding a new key to help with accessibility for users. The key can be setup in GameConfig.txt file under [UI] by adding "accessibilitymouse=2", which uses the "mouse middle button". Pressing the key in combat will "lock/unlock" the screen so that the cursor doesn't move the map cursor anymore. This allow the player to easily click the "bottom right hints" with the mouse at all times, without changing where the map cursor is on screen. This helps players to navigate the game using exclusively the mouse, without having to rely on the keyboard at all. This key should be moved to the regular key-rebind menu once it's been tested a little more.

• Save Files: Tiny optimizations to the format to make it just a bit smaller.

• Menu Sorting: Sorting could be used in combat under specific circumstances. Disabling that (sorting units while in combat creates issues with deployment).
  
• Hallowed Mind: Used to incorrectly trigger when being revived by Reraise. Fixed.
  
• Class Wheel: When using the custom option to show monsters sprites to represent Bzil classes in the class changing menu, it was showing human sprites after the last update. Fixed.
  
• NG Plus: When using "Keep AP" with a Newgame , a certain story character would not correctly retain their AP. Fixed.
  
• Mercer Warning: The warning to let the player know when the optional event with routing certain bandits would become unavailable would show even if the event was already completed. Fixed.
  
• Aries Ram: Last update broke the visuals. Fixed.

• Massive Hit: Increasing MP cost to 16 (from 12).

• Monsters: Adding Monsters.xml file, that allows the player to create new "base monsters entries", which are the building blocks of monsters (it contains their image, portrait, base elemental and status resistances, weapon range, etc). Using this file, monsters can be modified or new monster tiers, or different monsters can be created.
  
• GameOptions and Jobs Deprecating the Hats and Outfits section in the GameOptions.txt to set up the hat and outfit of classes. The class itself will now contain that information in Jobs.xml.

After 4 months (sorry about that) we are back with Did you know Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark! With the fact #6 we conclude the series but we plan to revisit it in the future as your reactions were super awesome ːsteamhappyː

Stay vigilant Arbiters...

Hello everyone!

Build 1.1.1 is a PC only update with one main goal: improving the mouse keyboard experience by adding hotkeys to all main "commands list".
This will allow players to easily make selections with the keyboard alone without needing to move the mouse and help speed things up. Here's what the menus now look like when using mouse and keyboard:




The short version is that you can press these hotkeys to automatically activate them and that things will remain consistent even as you learn new spells and abilities or use different characters.


The numbers on the side are the default keys assigned to "Hotkey 1 to 12" and can be configured in the regular "key binding" menu to be any key.


Each action in a list is bound to a specific hotkey, so that they remain consistent through time.
For example, the "End" command in battle will always be mapped to "Hotkey 6", regardless of which other commands are available.
That way, units with Double Cast, Focused Rage, next to a treasure chest, etc., will still use "Hotkey 6" to quickly end their turn so it remains consistent at all times.


The concept is the same for skills and spells, where a specific spell, such as "Water II" for example, will always have the same hotkey assigned to it regardless of which spells a Wizard has learned. So, learning "Fire II" later won't suddenly change the hotkey for "Water II" because now there's a new spell before it in the list.
For example, "Sniper Shot" will always be "hotkey 7" on every character at all times, even if you made a beeline for it and skipped most other skills in the Ranger tree.

The only exception to this is when using Double Cast, Infused Edge, etc. The generated list of available spells will simply use the hotkeys in order, since it's not possible to retain "always the same hotkey" across two different groups of abilities, since they would share hotkeys.

Lastly, please note that when using a gamepad, those hotkeys won't be visible in the lists and nothing is changed from the previous state of things.

Let us know how it goes!

Very small hotfix to prevent a rare possible crash during some cutscenes when using a certain set of options with a New Game Plus.

Sorry about that and thanks to the user that reported it to us and sent us their save file, it was a lot of help in fixing the issue!

Hello everyone!

We released Build 1.1.0 today.
The main addition is a versatile New Game Plus mode. In keeping true to our style of granting the player as many options as possible, you get to choice what carries over or not to the next game.


The options will be available from the title screen once you have completed the game and seen any of the endings.

We're also adding support for the SteelSeries keyboards, where the keys will light up in different color depending on the current state of the game (menus, combats, enemy turn, etc) and also show all possible hotkeys for a quick visual cue of what they are.

There's also a fair amount of balance tweaks and bug fixes. Finally, there are a few changes to some data files and engines to be ready to support the upcoming DLC, although that's fully in the background for now. The full patch notes are at the end of this post!


We're still ironing out various DLC systems and we're not quite ready to reveal everything yet, but here's a very small subset of what the monster mini-classes are going to feel like in practice:


There are a lot more options than this though, as we currently have over 15-20 different mini-classes in the works for monsters. Those classes aren't quite as big as human classes in terms of number of abilities, but each monster can currently equip two at once, which will provide a lot of options. We're still hammering out the details to make sure it's both fun and balanced though!


A new system was added a little while ago to follow developers on Steams and be notified when they have new releases and such. If you want to make sure not to miss our upcoming DLC release, give it a try! You can follow us on Steam from our developer page, right here: 6 Eyes Studio Steam Page.


10/11/2019 - Version 1.1.0

• New Game plus: Adding a New Game Plus option in the title screen. Upon clearing the game, the option will become available and the player can use the clear file to start a new game retaining various things from their previous game. The player can select what they retain and what is reset from a list of options.
  
• SteelSeries: Adding SteelSeries integration. When using a SteelSeries keyboard with per-key lighting capabilities, the keyboard will take different colors based on the current game state, and show all available hotkeys in white.
  
• New Male Portrait: Adding a forgotten male portrait.
  
• Optimizations: The game should load slightly faster than before.

• Healers: Updating the weights associated with healer classes to limit their count in maps where enemies are randomly generated. The net result should be less classes with healing spells in general.
  
• Bite: Increasing the base chance for the Poison effect to 62% (from 50%).
  
• Meatshield: Meatshield used to wear off when the target of it got its turn. Now it will wear off when the caster of it gets its turn (or it gets replaced by another Meatshield/cover effect). This will make it last longer and thus be more reliable/useful.
  
• New Recruits: When a class is unlocked, the player will always be able to switch to it, even if the requirements are not met. The main effect from this is when recruiting a unit in an advanced class (like Gambler for example), the unit will be able to switch back and forth to that class even if they don't meet the requirements.
  
• Missable Character: A certain character can't be recruited anymore after a certain point of the story has passed. There will now be a warning on the world map about the specific event vanishing soon if the player ignores it for too long.
  
• Double Cast: AI will be a little smarter with their second cast when using Double Cast. This is mostly a result of fixing a bug that make the second cast fizzle at times (it had other ramifications).
  
• Blood Suck: Increasing ratio bonus when the target is bleeding from 0.35x to 0.45x.
  
• Soul Suck: Increasing ratio bonus when the target is bleeding from 0.25x to 0.30x.
  
• Drain Health: Increasing damage ratio from 1x to 1.1x.
  
• Drain Soul: Increasing damage ratio from 0.35x to 0.45x.
  
• Gold Thread: Will now be granted as a victory reward in one of the late game story battles (this is not retroactive).
  
• Ancient Path: Small adjustments to a few random drop rates for ingredients.

• Map Position: The map position will now update in the top left corner after an enemy has done moving.

• Gelligh Treasures: If the player opened the treasures there "late into the story", it's possible it could have caused a problem with the "open all treasures" achievement. Fixed.
  
• Dialogues: Various small typos got fixed.
  
• Dash Strike/etc: Charge abilities would act weirdly when targeting large units. This is fixed.
  
• Class Change: The "Cancel sound" would play 2x in quick succession when leaving the screen. Fixed.
  
• Gogomboba City: Some extra units had their levels incorrectly set too high. Fixed.
  
• Maps: Fixing minor visuals issues with the grid on some maps.
  
• Vampire: Couldn't equip "cloth helmets" as they should. Fixed.
  
• Lists: Fixing a very rare case where a list would cause issues when empty and hitting confirm.
  
• Cleave: Fixing issues with Cleave not triggering at times: killing a target sporting Rebirth with a Collect ability, or with drowning wouldn't work correctly before.
  
• Screwworm Swamp: The map could be won by killing all allies. Fixed.
  
• Custom Portraits: Custom portraits had issues on Linux/Mac and would have issues if the user synced files across computers where the absolute customdata path was different. This is resolved. Save files will not save the absolute path of custom portraits anymore (that wasn't intended to begin with). Previous custom portraits shouldn't be affected, but if they are, setting them again at the guild should fix any issue.
  
• Enemy Passives: Fixing two instances of specific enemies having the same passive equipped twice.
  
• Pektites: Tier 3 red pektites had the wrong counter. Fixed.
  
• Meatshield: Fixing a rare crash with Meatshield.
  
• Sorting: Sorting units from the troops menu while in combat would have all sorts of weird issues. Disabling Sorting from the battle screen for now.
  
• Master of All: If a unit had mastered a class for which they didn't meet the requirements (so, a unit was recruited as an advanced class directly), that mastery wouldn't count towards the "Master of All" achievement. This should be fixed.
  
• Options: Selecting a line on the Options screen could feel unresponsive with the mouse as the far right side of the line wouldn't trigger the line selection without a click. Fixed.
  
• Arena: The enemies speed value wouldn't be used correctly on their first turn during arena matches (due to not being calculated until the match starts). Fixed. The turn-order might not be accurate until the match starts because of this.
  
• Pounce: It was possible for an enemy to use pounce to land on the same tile as another enemy that died with rebirth. Fixed.
  
• Dreadmaw: Ability was supposed to steal Buffs from the target, but that wasn't working correctly. Fixed.
  
• Dash Strike/etc: When an enemy would charge over a trap without having moved before, they would still be able to move after the trap interrupted the charge attack. Fixed.
  
• Dash Strike/etc: Under specific and rare circumstances, some the red tiles representing the charge area of effect could remain visible during targeting, even though they should have been erased.
  
• Descriptions: Fixing various descriptions typos.
  
• Loco Rush: Fixing a rare issue where a character might disappear oddly if there is no obvious valid destination when getting pushed around by Loco Rush.
  
• Spread Pain: Can now be used with Infused Edge and Focus Fire, as intended.
  
• Shoving Abilities: Fixing a wrong interaction between pushing abilities and targets with Mirage, where the Mirage would absorb the base damage but still displace the target or apply the bonus damage from the collision. Mirage now absorbs the whole effect.
  
• Music: Music could have a jump in volume when backing out on the Load menu from the Title screen. Fixed.
  
• Options: The Apply command in options list couldn't be clicked with the mouse before. Fixed.
  
• Double Cast: On rare occasions, when enemies would use Double Cast, their second spell could fizzle. Hopefully this is fixed now.
  
• Worms: Worms wouldn't use their breath attack as often as they should have due to a bug. Fixed.
  
• Kawa Bandits: Small adjustment to one of the early-game tables that had a typo, resulting in worse loot than it should have.
  
• Name Input: Using the "cancel key" in the name box would cancel the name input before. Fixed. Some minor mouse interactions were cleaned up as well.
  
• Obelisks: An extra check was added upon loading a save file to make sure the flag about having "all obelisks" is correctly set. There probably wasn't an issue on that side, but "just in case".
  
• Enemies: Once the player reached level 99, some enemies could be generated with story classes they shouldn't have access to. Fixed.

• Fonts: Adding a Vietnamese font to the list of available fonts for modders to use.
  
• Fonts: Adding a Japanese font to the list of available fonts for modders to use (it currently doesn't support Kanjis though).
  
• Errors: Adding more error checking for invalid data.
  
• Ingredients: Ingredients file will not require all sections to exist anymore (recipes, badges, gadgets, ingredients) and non-existent section will be treated as empty.
  
• Ingredients: Fixing some potential errors when modding this file where added data would behave oddly.
  
• Save Files: Slight update to the format to make it a little bit more efficient.

Hello everyone!

We're still getting things ready for our detailed devlog on the DLC creation process, but we've been itching to give everyone a little preview of the new art we've been creating!

We're planning to add a bunch of new maps to the DLC, including to any town that doesn't currently have one. This is a preview of the Port Grendal map:


We're still wrapping up details for all the new monsters-related systems we'll be adding, but we already have a solid idea about our new Wrangler class, which will be using small pets for its abilities. Stay tuned for the juicy details of their unique mechanics in our upcoming devlogs!


We hope you guys are as excited as we are about the new content that's coming!



We also wanted to mention that Stygian: Reign of the Old Gods, a Lovecraftian horror RPG with turn-based tacitcal combat, just released today!

It's made by some good friends of ours and packed with madness-inducing lore, tentacles and fun!

Give it a look right here:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/779290/Stygian_Reign_of_the_Old_Ones

Hello everyone,

we reached a great milestone and only thanks to you! We passed over 1k reviews here on Steam! ːsteamhappyː

We said multiple times but let us say it again. You guys have been simply amazing through-out the early access and after the release. Thank you for your continuous support and faith in us.