It’s been a minute since my last update! I took a quick vacation, had three huge projects suddenly drop into my lap, ran into car trouble, ran into more car trouble, and finally got my hands on some new development hardware. So, it’s been a busy June for me, and the fun isn’t over just yet, since now I have two game projects to give updates on!

In case you missed the news, The Tenth Line is finally coming to the Nintendo Switch with a bunch of enhancements and additions here and there. It’s safe to say my time has been completely overtaken with this project, as I am hard at work trying to get it ready for release by the end of summer (don’t hold me to that, though).

Before I dig into the new additions to The Tenth Line Special Edition (hereafter referred to as “TTLSE”), I haven’t completely put development on Eden’s Last Sunrise on hold. Just, mostly. I’ve been barreling through coding the complete game calendar for one of the story paths that I intend to use as a testbed to make sure the pacing and balance are all in order. This is 180 in-game days worth of events, with some days having multiple events. This is essentially all the framework that will kick off every cutscene, battle, and side mission for that particular playthrough. I’ll admit it’s taking a bit longer than I anticipated – I’m about a quarter of the way through – but once it’s done, I can start adding content in the form of battles and cutscenes, and it should all tie together nicely. Once I’ve got a rhythm figured out, though, the rest of the game should fall into place around this cockamamie framework I’ve developed.

In the meantime, ELS updates will be on hold while I gradually introduce additions and features for TTLSE. Good? Good.

I spent much of the first week setting up the hardware, coaching myself on documentation, porting the base project to the new version of Unity, and getting my professional ducks in a row. That’s all the boring stuff, and thankfully, it’s out of the way. Things seemed to run well out of the box, barring a few low-level technical things I had to swap out, so I’m glad for that. Since I knew the project wouldn’t be a complete tear-down job, I decided to look ahead on features and polish to add.

First off, I decided to change up the main game loop to be better suited to a portable, pick-up-and-play experience. The original game’s loop was pretty deliberately designed: explore -> battle -> use items for training/specialties/Power Flow -> explore some more. This loop will be maintained, but will feel brisker in practice. For one, I’m removing the concept of “weapon levels” entirely as a gate to skill training. Instead, you’re free to level up your training as much as you want, limited only by your character’s capacity (which refills after battles and when picking up large stars in the exploration mode). The weapon level mechanic is basically just a gate to progression that I don’t want to keep around, since the “treasure hunt” quests (the best way to improve weapon levels) could be pretty demanding to a more casual player. Now, treasure hunts and “weapon upgrade” treasures will provide a big boost to training experience instead. I also made a quick change to the “power star” pickups – now, they benefit your entire party with a power bonus, and not just the character who picked them up. Easy peasy.

In a similar vein, I’m simplifying the specialties a bit as well. For the Princess, Fury and Forgiveness are no longer affected by skills in battle, meaning one less factor to worry over when choosing a skill. Essentially, you’re now planning ahead for whether she should be a healer or a SP buffer ahead of time by using items as before, and you don’t need to worry about breaking the role in the middle of battle.

Tox is getting somewhat of an overhaul. I’ve brought the ability to switch his breath element on-the-fly into the main game (it was originally a later addition to the easier difficulties). I’m also simplifying his affinities to a range of 0 to 100, instead of -100 to 100, so it’s not possible to make him entirely immune to an element or completely pathetic at dealing damage with it. I’ve also removed his “Dragon Snack” ability since he can swap elements mid-battle now.

In a similar vein, I’ve simplified enemy elemental resistances to just “weak” and “strong,” so it’s a little less granular, but it’s easier to plan things out on a turn-by-turn basis. Striking enemies with an element they’re weak to will also pop them up higher than usual, making them easier to juggle and score critical hits against.

I will probably leave Rik’s “roulette” specialty alone, but I may change items to have more orderly patterns and fill more slots at once so it’s more viable to use.

To compensate for all these player benefits, I plan to tweak enemy damage to make foes more of a threat. Defending is still an option, but the best defense will be a good offense, so to speak. Eliminating as many foes as possible in one round will help mitigate the damage taken, and make the Princess’ specialty powers more desirable. I’ll play around with this a lot in the coming weeks.

It’s been way too long without some pictures, so I’ll briefly talk about some graphical changes! For one, I’m completely overhauling the particle effects (magic and so forth), making things less blobby and more flashy and colorful. I’ll also improve the audio effects, and tighten the timing on some skills to make things a bit faster-paced and more exciting. This is going to consume a bulk of my development time, but I think the results will be more than worth it.

One addition I’ve already made is an audio and graphical effect whenever a character’s “super” skill is available. They get a nice flashy “lightning” aura around them, like our friend Tox here. Assist characters will get this effect, too, and it’s color-coded for your convenience.

I’m still feeling my way around with my new particle emitter options, so things will probably change/improve over time.

Most of the plain “colored smoke” effects found in the original game will get overhauled. For practice, I already gave the charming Syx a high-quality poison aura, too! There is a tightrope between “hyper-realistic” and “completely cartoonish” that I’m trying to walk, like in this example. But this time, I’m swaying more toward “this effect looks like something” instead of “this effect is just for a bit of color.” We’ll see where that plan goes, too.

Lastly, I plan to add a few new music tracks to the game here and there. I’ll share them as they’re finished, so look for those in the coming weeks. I also plan to tweak and expand some dialog here and there, and slip in a few new scenes where appropriate. Nothing huge or story-altering, so don’t worry about that. One thing I do want to add is to have recruited assist characters (e.g. the ones purchased as bonuses from the “Spend Gildeds” page) appear as NPCs like Sonya and Lawrence in places where they wouldn’t normally appear, so they can give their thoughts on the area and have some casual chit-chat with your party members. These little interactions will more or less be non-canonical, and just for fun (they will basically only be available in the post-game or New Game Plus anyway, so think of them like a bonus). I don’t have plans to add any new characters, but if that changes, I’ll announce it.

Speaking of assist characters, I’ve revamped those, too! Well, mostly. Since I’m increasing the focus on elemental damage, I’m also standardizing every assist character into a specific elemental role. So now, Lawrence deals sky damage exclusively, Sonya deals ice damage, and the dragons do their dragon things.

Next time, I hope to be able to show some more new spell effects and the UI enhancements I’m making. I’m feeling good about where the Special Edition is going, and I’m happy as always to be completely open about development and to show how the gears slowly turn inside my head when I have a ~vision~ for something new.

Thanks for reading.