It’s time for me to give an update and more details on this game! First of all, here’s the title screen (work in progress but the logo is final):

But who exactly is marrying, you might ask. Well I don’t want to spoil too much, but since it’s the premise of the game, and you get to know it anyway during the first scenes of the story, I’ll tell you just this time!

The marriage is between Lydia, the princess of the Moon Elves (and one of the love interests of this game), and High Cleric Marian from Lakshun, the capitol of Paqwana. The game begins with Saren or Elenor being summoned by Apolimesho, who explains how such a marriage is very important, since it’s the first marriage in years between an Elf (albeit a Moon Elf) and a member of the Human Empire (Paqwana is part of the Empire).

As you can imagine, a lot of people don’t like this marriage, and they’ll do everything in their power to make it fail. In addition, a certain familiar succubus is looking after our team…

The RPG gameplay

Regarding the gameplay, I couldn’t of course reuse a previous system, I had to do some changes! Even if the core system remains the same. There are some interesting variants though: let’s see them together.

First of all, the front/back row system is back! This was a very popular request and I agree it makes the battles more strategic. They might not be as cool looking as if they were seen in first person (Cursed Lands or Planet Stronghold 2) but since Loren had this system I thought it makes sense to do the various spin-offs using it.

The battles will still be turn based, with movement order determined by skills and attributes. The four elements + dark magic of Loren will be replaced by 3 main resistances Elemental, Debilitation and Mental) each one with 3 sub-categories. This because differently from Loren there will be other kind of magic (more about this below).

The biggest change though will be the overdrive system: it’s a value represented by 3 stars that slowly fills up as you fight battles (deal damage, heal, etc). Each character has a special overdrive skill that is very powerful and can change the tides of battle, but using it requires one overdrive star.

This means that people might want to save them for tougher battles, adding some more strategy overall. Of course everything is still work in progress and during beta I’ll tweak this new system better.

Regarding the playable classes, another very popular request was being able to play as magic user and I’m happy to announce that yes, you’ll be able to play as mage if you want!

There will be four playable classes: Warrior, Thief, Mage and Warden (sort of healer magic user).

Like in Cursed Lands there will be items that can cast spells or give skills like the “Book of Nightmares” above.

New resistances and stuff for nerds

And now some stuff that will be interesting mostly for the RPGs nerds 😛

I’m still balancing the various skills, spells, resistances, etc. but I have decided to try moving away from the elemental+dark resistance, to use a different system. The various school of magic will still exist of course, but now the resistance is based on the actual effect/damage type.

There will be 3 main damage types: Elemental, Debilitation and Mental. They should cover almost everything.

In Loren, in practice every spell was dealing some form of elemental damage. But moving forward I also plan to have different stuff, like spells that impact target’s emotions, feelings, etc.

Some examples:

• a Fireball will still obviously inflict Elemental damage
• the Stinging Swarm spell will inflict Debilitation damage
• the Dark Magic spell “Brain Shatter” will inflict Mental damage

And so on. I think this system is better because allows different spells/damage types and resistances and also makes more sense for some spells. Then for each damage type there will be 3 debuff resistances, as shown below:

The armors will give defense and protection against one of the 3 main categories, while the jewelry will increase resistances against some of the debuffs. The resistance of the armor will reduce damage:

An armor with 50% Elemental resistance will reduce the damage from a Fireball from 20 to 10.

But for the debuffs it will be a percentage to determine if they trigger or not (maybe I’ll use it to reduce the length instead, still need to do some tests).

The romances

Also for those who missed the news, I’ve managed to find an artist to edit existing CGs so that both Lydia and Nathir can be bisexual romances! Which means the following:

• as Elenor, you can continue Rei’s romance or start single and pursue Lydia or Nathir
• as Saren, you can conitnue Myrth’s romance or start single and pursue Lydia or Nathir

So there will be two straight and one homosexual romance for each playable character, much better than originally planned! 🙂

Each romance will have one “couple” love scene, plus 1 “pin-up” image, which means the love interest will be seen in first person, so he/she is alone. As you know unfortunately this artist doesn’t work for me anymore so I cannot do any changes (it was already hard to find someone to edit the romances good enough to make Lydia/Nathir bisex!).

Adult content

For my newer games I’ve started offering optional adult content. For some older titles though, I have all art ready (I did it years ago) so in those there can be more erotic texts, but unfortunately the images cannot be changed (would need to get them edited again and I don’t think the result would be good).

This means that for this and the other 3 Saren/Elenor spin-off games, and Curse Of Mantras, there won’t be adult content. Nudity, yes, but nothing as explicit as my recent titles like Hazel or Planet Stronghold 2, to be clear.

That’s all, I hope this post has answered many questions that people have been asking me more or less privately!