Lakadema

In the game’s second chapter, Joshua/Lisa will meet a mysterious alien named Lakadema. She’s part of a race never seen before on Planet Stronghold, and also the source of great power.  She has a connection with the whole planet, like she could speak to it as if it was a living being. Her powers were exploited by others, so the player decided to intervene and protect her.  I won’t go into to many details because it’s a plot spoiler, but she will be a romance option for both Lisa and Joshua.

Some might think that Lakadema is very shy, but in reality she is very reserved and bears a big burden.  Sometimes she speaks in riddles, but in the end everything she says will make sense.

The other party member will react differently to having a powerful alien inside the colony or in the case of Rebel alignment, yet ANOTHER powerful alien beside Shiler. Lakadema is like a wild animal: both scary and beautiful at the same time.  Scary because you know how deadly she can be, beautiful because of her uniqueness.

Lakadema will play a key role through the whole game, and will hep Nelson achieve their goals, and earning their trust.

Progress update

Earlier this month I passed the 100,000 words goal on Planet Stronghold 2 script. I am still writing the second chapter out of four (chapters have variable length). I am not sure yet but it’s likely even this game will end up around the 250,000 words range! Another small game ™ !

However, I’ve been working not only on the story but also on the gameplay. I don’t want to get cocky but I personally think this is the best RPG I made for gameplay, even better than SOTW (if you forgive me the missing front/back rows…)

And it’s interesting how new ideas to balance the gameplay (or make it more fun/realistic) comes at unexpected times. For example, in the screenshot above, I was playtesting the second chapter maps and I noticed something for the first time: as you explore the map, it gets revealed, and you can stumble into enemies.

Like the first game, you can avoid the random encounters, but avoiding them injures slightly your party. I did this to avoid the player skipping all the fights, making them meaningless.

But I didn’t take into account one thing: even if you stumbled into all the possible random encounters, and you decided to avoid them all, losing all your party health, the game would still let you navigate through the maps with your hovercraft!! lol

Basically, you could spend the first day on each chapter to unveil all the maps at the cost of lowering your party health to zero. Not a problem, since you could just go back to the colony and advance time by one day to get full health again!

So now I changed it so that you can’t explore the map anymore if your overall health goes below the 20%. A very simple, small change, but that has a big impact on gameplay, making everything more realistic, and for the hardcore RPGs players, more fun.