Welcome to the 5th monthly devlog! There's been a bit of a gap between this devlog and the last, but there hasn't been anything of note between the last update and the beginning of this month. IRL responsibilities come at you fast, and the updates on Eysir too were few and far in between to put anything interesting in a long-form devlog. Primarily done in that time period were many important but uninteresting bugfixes. Thankfully, starting this month, development work should be kicking back into gear 110%! Starting with a massive change that will improve game balance going forward:

Combat turn order adjustments

Previously, turn order was decided by a resource called Reaction Points. Each unit in battle would increase their RP by 1 repeatedly until at least one was at a target RP, at which point it was their turn to act. Acting in combat cost a certain amount of RP, which was determined by the type of action taken. While this initially sounds reasonable, it had several major flaws. For one thing, movement was directly tied to RP. Each space cost 1 RP. I couldn't increase or decrease speed without also affecting movement range, and the only real advantage to having more RP was being able to move farther. Using more RP also caused more delay, making balancing movement a bit strange. Another issue was that turn order felt a lot more fixed than it should, given the small amount of RP a unit could reasonably have.

I could go on about the issues, but those don't matter any more because it's fixed! My solution was very simple: go back to the drawing board. RP was out. Gone. "Yeeted," as the kids say these days. It's been replaced with a much better, more proven system—delay. Each action has a set amount of base delay. This is then modified by the unit's speed to obtain the actual delay. The delay of every unit is decreased by 1 repeatedly until at least one unit is at 0 delay, at which point that unit acts. It makes fast units act faster, slow units act slower, and now turn order adjustments from different actions can be finer. If any of this sounds familiar, similar systems are used in Final Fantasy X and Falcom's Trails series.

One other massive improvement is an easily-readable turn order display on-screen at all times. Player units are in blue, enemy units are in red, and highlighting an action will display an arrow showing where in the turn order that unit will move after taking that action.

More equally exciting improvements are set to come in the following month... Thank you for reading, and stay tuned!