Greetings travelers! I bare tidings of progress! *ahem* sorry.

So this week is another good one. As you all know from last week's devlog, I wrapped up story art last week and started the rebalancing project, aka, The Great Crunch. The results of my labors are in this wonderful Friday as I'm pleased to say the combat balancing (at least for Fighter - Ritualist runs) is tested and good to go for the Underworld segment of the game. That saaaaaaaaaid. 

I will still need to test the Striker and Hunter classes and get them started on rebalancing and continue overriding old skills to match the new system. Death himself is overall in a good spot but still needs refinement. There was a bit too much RNG in some places but I think that I tamed it, but more runs are required to verify. 

The Overworld is already going through some initial testing work, which will take more time to work through, but I expect I'll have plenty to report on that subject next week. I expect to have the -main- segment of the Ancient Hills balanced by next Friday, and I'll probably need to address all the balancing on attached content simply for the sake of not forgetting anything. 

Now before I end my segment of the news, I have a video showing off the way the formula for damage now works, in the best way possible: a run in with Death himself!

For Zeph's work, I asked her to make a very happy person, so let's see how happy they are!

Oh... oh no. That's not terrifying at all. Ahem.

So! New boss design is done, and we've got one more 'battler' sort of asset before (I think) we're done with monsties. There's one or two individuals in the Underworld segment that will probably get new designs but that's not the bulk of the work I'm gonna focus on.

Finally, we have word from our composer, and he brings us spoopy scary area themes. The Corrupted Sacred Valley track is in and I can immediately see some potential for more than just one place to use this track. It's not done but pretty far along from what I can tell and it sounds great!

Right, so we're already at the end of this week's devlog, and if you couldn't tell, I was looking forward to writing this one based on my more jovial tone this week. I'm going to try and do my best to record some gameplay samples of the progress of the game as things move forward, especially all of the boss fights.

This rebalance is going to be core to the new update, so when it is done we'll be very much on track to completion. We still have quite a ways to go, but this rebalance even just starting will be a massive contribution to the update's success. I'll probably be at this 2-4 weeks if I had to guess before this rebalance is close to done. No, no Christmas update, even though I tend to happen to line up with it a lot, I don't think this year will repeat that trend.

Anyway that's all I really have for now, but before I leave you all, here's the full version of the design I made for the Death Boss video. You all have a great week!