January 2024 Update

Happy New Year to everyone! We are brushing off the dust from 2023 and ready to focus on 2024! We hope you all had a restful vacation!

Campaign Updates

Survey, survey, survey!

We are currently sitting at an 87% completion ratio which is good but most Kickstarter’s tend to get to 90% or more. If you haven’t completed your survey, you can access it from this link:

https://double-kickstarter.backerkit.com/

Roles

The bot is done and we will be sending out roles for anyone who went back and re-entered their correct discord ID in the Discord survey question. Bot will do its thing starting on the 12th of January.

AppleID

We mentioned that AppleID’s anonymous E-mails means you cannot receive updates nor get the survey link. We’ll have to go in through the backend and alter your E-mail addresses one by one so please reach out to us at pr@yukikaze.ltd so we can adjust that.

Development Updates

It’s a new year now, but here is our project report from December. For the first time in a while, it’ll be brought to you by Kaneko.

ARMED FANTASIA 12/2023 Project Report

Greeting

Happy New Year 2024! I hope you’ll all keep cheering us on this year.

Field-related

Work has begun on the world map and town maps, and the quality of the landscapes has gone up.

As an example, objects such as cacti and undergrowth have been added to the world map, and we’ve added enough greenery as we can permit in a wasteland. There’s an abundance of data on the maps now. Wind blows over the ground and the shadows of clouds also slide across it, so there’s a lot of emotion to it.

Once you step outside of Ingram’s (one of the main characters) house, you’ll see a volcano in the distance that looks so menacing and imposing it’s almost comical. (It’s really unfortunate that I can’t show you the actual video)

It’d be like stepping outside the castle town of Tantegel only to see that the Dragonlord’s castle (the final dungeon) is right next to you. I haven’t been that surprised in a while.

Additionally, we’re gradually adding more reactions to the game, such as sand being kicked up when the characters run. As the controls are improved, we’re getting closer and closer to reaching full realization of “a JRPG that’s fun to move around in.”

Aside from the quality boosts in each map, we’re also working on white models for the underground area of a new map. Work has begun on dungeons near the middle part of the story, so it could be said that work is proceeding apace.

Concept Art

Work is also continuing on the concept art. The image we’re showing off today is the outside of a dungeon that appears in the prologue, which we’ve named: Trial Tower of the Tearless World.
Is this meant to be a trial in order to turn Londenium, the stage of our story, into a tearless world, or is there a trial here because it’s already become a tearless world? It’s a hard name to decipher, but it’s clear that this will be a tower that tests the player a great deal with repeated jumps and block pushes.

Battle-related

The base system used in this game’s battles is the Cross Order Tactics system, where enemy and ally turn order intersect with each other. You can interject your characters at certain points to break up enemy’s combos or use Force Breaks to deal massive damage. We’ve implemented the UI for this along with all the other mechanisms needed for battles, such as status ailments and elemental effects.

Even though it’s a highly strategic turn-based battle system, I realized that when you actually sit down to play it, there are a lot of things you actually need to look at, and it’s become a very detailed system with a lot of different elements to understand. How are we going to make this easy to play without moving too far away from our initial concept? This will be an important discussion point for me and the people in charge of the battle system going forward. My personal feeling is that the stars of normal enemy encounters are the player characters. I feel like things should be adjusted so that things center around satisfying victories earned from selecting commands that match up with the situation.

Scenario

“Still writing. Still suffering at a good pace.”

…It’s become a tradition each update for me to write this, but I actually finished the vertical axis that comprises everything that can be categorized as the main scenario in 2023, and an end mark has been attached to it. Good work, me.

Still, I’ve only finished the first draft, so I’ll naturally be brushing things up in second and third drafts. And I’m sure that merciless edits will be made to the crazy parts that go beyond the limits of ethics and budgets.

Additionally, I still have the sub-quests to deal with, and since this is an RPG, there will also be town NPC lines and dialog changes when the player later returns to a town they’ve already passed through, so I don’t feel the least bit like I’ve actually finished my scenario work.

So I’m still writing…still suffering at a good pace…

Scenario-related

The main scenario is finished for now, so we’re right in the middle of changing the temporary names/IDs of the towns and dungeons into ones that fit their finished forms. (Such as Trial Tower of the Tearless World, which we unveiled above.)

The nomenclature of all the maps are pretty much confirmed, so we’ve listed them up to check the balance of the names and adjusting things as necessary, especially when we notice several names that look too similar (due to habits). If the details change when the map is actually created, this naturally causes some names to not fit anymore, so it can take a surprisingly long time for everything to get 100% confirmed.

Speaking of names, I’m also in the middle of giving names to sub characters, key items, and other details that appear in the main scenario. I don’t really know how other writers work, but personally I don’t really decide the names of key items and sub characters before writing the scenario. Sorry if this is all a bit too abstract, but it seems that the part of the brain I use for scenario writing is different from the part of the brain I use for naming things, so I just can’t do both at the same time.

Therefore, I usually give things random names as I write the scenario, then give them proper names afterwards (or get someone else to name them for me).

Design-related

Things have finally calmed down regarding the new character design work, so I’ve ordered our designers to work on advertising things as well as standing pose illustrations that will also partially be used in the game. Things are pretty much finished for the main six characters currently. But the unique characteristics of the weapons they use are also important, so an evil person requested to have each character wield an ARM as well. Compared to normal standing pose illustrations, this takes way more work, so please take extra care to check out those aspects when we eventually reveal them to you.

Kaiju designs, kaiju models, and kaiju motions are all being worked on as well. Reading that, it may seem like things aren’t progressing with the kaiju, but things are proceeding just like how they are with sub-characters connected to the story as well as NPC placement in towns.

Today, I’d like to reveal to you all the design & model for the private army soldiers led by the Iconocluster. They’re dissatisfied with how the world is being run by the Church of the Sacred Key, so after turning into outlaws, they approved (approved?) of the Iconocluster’s anti-church sentiments and joined up with them. Normal NPCs with common sense call them the “dregs at the bottom” and shun them.

Unlike the wild kaiju who roam around, they utilize intelligence and combos to stymie the main characters’ efforts. Their greatest characteristic are the illegally modified “bootleg” ARMs they use in battle.

Event storyboards are proceeding right along with the scenario work. We’re also creating new visual storyboards for Force Breaks.