Wow. This one is awkward. Considering last update we told you all that we would be back to posting every Thursday, and here we are on a Friday evening, its safe to say we missed that promise. We are very sorry for this, but it only happened because me, the guy who writes these, was not feeling great yesterday so I left it until today. Sorry about that! BUT We have some big big big new things to talk about, and we will be going over pretty much everything that has changed since the beta! 

This is going to be a longer post so strap in! 

Features!

We have added a bunch of new features and quality of life changes to improve the overall gameplay experience over the past few weeks since our beta! 

Some of the new quality of life changes we have added to the game include new battle tips during combat! We have constantly had a lot of feedback about certain aspects of combat being a bit vague. While it is still missing new assets for the UI, we have now added visuals to show how much damage an attack will do, and how likely that attack is to actually hit!

As you can see its still in a prototype state at the moment without any awesome UI assets, but those are in the to do list alongside a million other tasks we have on our plate right now!

Another new quality of life change includes our journal notifications! Its a very small change, but something we think will solve a ton of our issues with clarity!

The screenshot here is from an older state in development but we also have some wonderful UI assets for the notification that I think you will all love, but that is for later in the post! Now lets get into some of the more fun and awesome new features!

One of the biggest discussions we had as a team involved our interaction system. We are overall satisfied with how the interaction system works, but the team wanted a little bit more engagement when it comes to finding these points of interest! In the end, we settled on a new Smell mechanic! Now on a button press, Oscar will sniff around and new smell particles will highlight interesting things to interact with! (Blame Itch's upload limit for the poor GIF quality)

There is also a brand new Pickup mechanic! Now while exploring the house, Oscar can find and grab onto some of the items you will find around the house! Different items will do different things! You can hold onto an axe to make Oscar more powerful during combat, or hold onto a sandwich for some emergency healing!

This has been a big feature we have wanted to add for a long time, but other things have been a higher priority until now! We still have a lot left to do but this has been the biggest push in terms of new features being added to the game. 

Endings!

Something that has been missing from our game since the beginning, and something we have been putting off for far too long has been endings to our game! While we are still in the concepting stage, we have finally settled on the endings we want to include in our game. Yes, you heard that right, we are planning to have multiple endings in our game! We wanted to include a decent amount of variation while still keeping things somewhat linear! There are a couple of different small things you as a player can do before you make your big decision on the overall ending! We wanted a couple of small changes to the ending if you interact with certain objects, or make certain small decisions! We wont go too deep into the details, as we want to keep the endings as close to our chests as possible, but its something worth mentioning as it has been a big push for us this week!

Assets!

Holy assets. Where do I even begin. The art team has been going insane this past few weeks! While some of our artists have been lending me a hand with cleaning up and improving the gameplay experience, the rest of the team has been very hard at work bringing our game to life!

Lets quickly start with the UI And concept art! There has been a lot of new UI and concept art done, and while we dont want to show any of the assets relating to the games endings, we do want to share some of the visuals we have planned for certain features in the game!

First we want to show you some of our new screens for winning or losing a fight!

We also have some UI to show for the journal notifications!

Next, we have some new UI for when you examine an enemy during combat!

We also have a new attack animation for when Oscar is holding onto a weapon in his mouth!

What a week!

As you can see, we have been busy! Once again, I am so sorry this devblog was a day late, but health comes first! This isnt even everything we have done since our beta, but its all we are able to show you guys at the moment! Thank you all so much for reading this far, unless you just scrolled to the bottom to see the pretty art. I wouldn't blame you!!! 

Anyway, this is all from us this week, assuming I have no health struggles again next week, the devblog should be back to Thursdays! Hopefully this time I have learned my lesson about saying that haha! Enjoy your weekend and continue following Chimera as it approaches its final deadline!

PS WE ARE POSTING THE BETA VERY SOON!!!!!