In today's dev stream, we start experimenting with a new subsystem: Bravery & Break!

Bravery

Bravery is a secondary resource that can be used in combat. It is the equivalent of Mana or Energy in a typical RPG, but it also acts as a secondary HP (Resolve) bar that mitigates damage.

This means during combat, you will be using Bravery both as a resource for casting Abilities and to prevent damage to yourself. Because BRV is a fluid resource that can be regained and spent easily, you would want to take damage using BRV whenever possible, because replenishing your Resolve is a lot harder and can only be restored when you Rest. (healing and potions in this context can only restore Bravery, not Resolve)

Bravery, as such, will be the new combat resource you will need to manage, in place of the old Action Loadout system.

Break

Break is an additional effect that happens when you take large amounts of damage that reduces your BRV and RS all at once. This causes you to Break, which stuns you and leaves you unable to act. This can also be inflicted on enemies, and very much emulates Break systems that you may find familiar in classic turn-based JRPGs.

New Ability Descriptions

Ability and Technique descriptions are slowly being rewritten and tweaked to reflect the changes to Action Loadout requirement and Bravery. Their descriptions would now convey:

• The EXP cost for learning the Ability
• The Loadout requirement to learn it (how many of that Action Die you must have on your Loadout, called your Action Rank and denoted with Roman numerals instead of numbers for clarity)
• The number of Actions from your Turn it would take to execute.
• The Bravery, aka the energy cost to execute it.

Certain Abilities also would have mechanics that gain Bravery based on certain criteria, such as number of enemies hit by an Ability, incentivising the Player to find the most optimal situations to use their Abilities in order to fully refund or even gain more Bravery than they spent.

Faction Abilities

We also briefly discussed rearranging Abilities and Techniques so that they would instead be found under certain Factions! For example, the Amerusans, a group of nomadic arms dealers and gunslingers, would have their own suite of Abilities/Techniques that you can learn that are all focused around gunslinging tricks, such as increasing ranged damage or ricocheting bullets.

This means if multiple Ventures are associated with the same Faction, instead of finding a duplicate description of that Ability under both Ventures, you would instead find that Ability under the associated Faction those Ventures belong to. This is part of a larger effort to make Factions more immersive and flavourful for Players by providing benefits and boons when you seek them out or gain reputation with them!

That's the gist of the concepts tackled in today's dev stream! Look forward to these concepts being refined further in preparation for V0.5 and one step closer to a finalised 1.0 release! Thank you for your support.