Almost a year after v0.2.1, today we bring a big update on Era’s Time Delivery Service, with a big overhaul on gameplay, HUD and hero sprites.

Heroes now have fewer skills with only 4-5 so player can focus on them. We reorganized and rebalanced all battles for quest 1 (Era only) and 2 (Era and Rosemary). Now, both quests have only 2 battles. The last battle still adds Maria in the party vs the molemen and is still not balanced.

Hero sprites are now all colored! We also added many HUD & visual improvements including action effect previewing, enemy turn action prediction (which also affects gameplay) and FX. There are also extra settings in the main menu.

Below is the full changelog for v0.3.0:

Added:

• HUD: show gauge value as “CURRENT / MAX”
• HUD: preview HP/MP change during action target selection with gauge fraction animated highlight
• HUD: when using Rewind skills, show target status history roll (a timeline with the recorded status of the fighter at every turn, to allow player to see the final result after Rewind)
• HUD: enemy action prediction. Hover the icons below the turn queue for more details.
• HUD: show target name when selected
• Settings: add FullScreen, Graphics Quality and Resolution options
• Settings: add Reset to Defaults button
• FX: create skill and status FX from Jean Moreno’s Cartoon FX Remaster Free assets
  • Light, Heavy, Fire Hit
  • Buff Up/Down
  • Recover HP/MP
  • Various skills including Accelerate, Burning Shot, and a several currently unused skills
  • Status appearance and effects: Poison, Burning

Changes:

• Fighters: heroes each have 4-5 skills for simplicity, but each is impactful
  • In particular, we moved Era’s Temporal Bomb to Rosemary’s skillset as Grenade, weaker (magic power 4) but still ignores Defend stance
• Balance: rebalance heroes, enemies (including AI behavior), skills and status effects for the first 4 battles
• Formula: big overhaul of damage and buff formulas as part of rebalancing. We now use Linear Damage Reduction and most stats use a linear scale for buffs (+/-15% per step, max 6 buff levels for up to +/-90%). Speed uses flat buff.
• Gameplay: Rewind gauges skills (except Self) can now target dead fighters. This can revive/kill hero fighter with appropriate animation. Revived fighters can immediately act on the following turn.
• Gameplay/UI: skills that buff/debuff speed now do this (with FX) before moving turn, for better feedback
• Gameplay: Round End Burn effect still pulls next turn 1 turn earlier, but does not apply speed buff on top
• Sprite: Rosemary and Maria have new colored sprites
• UI: player can skip Splash Screen with Submit press
• UI: improved main menu colors and layout
• UI: add thumbnails for all quests, adjust dimensions
• UI: Settings: improve navigation, supporting vertical wrap around
• Texture: set texture compression to High Quality to avoid blurry character sprites in particular
• HUD: turn queue face highlight uses alpha oscillation
• HUD: change fighter status box tint on highlight
• HUD: move fighter status box on their turn
• HUD: HP and MP gauges change color based on threshold
• HUD: animate target selection cursor
• HUD: fade out stat points change labels
• HUD: improved regeneration icons to separate + and just a brighter variant of main graphic color
• FX: animate highlight tint of selected fighter. Increased overall brightness of target selection highlight.
• Arena: use predetermined fighter slots based on the number of fighters on each side
• Audio: integrate IntroLoop for all BGMs
• Audio: cross-fade between Main Menu and Credits BGM in menu

Fixes:

• AI only picks available action
• Settings: fix losing selection when clicking on choice arrow or slider
• Settings: fix navigation up from Back button, and set initial selection to top item