Happy (almost) Halloween, Fallers! Things have been hectic lately as in just the past couple of months I got a job, got laid off from said job, got a new job, and now may or may not be going back to college. Rest assured though, progress is still being made on PinesQuest 2D, and here’s how things are looking right now:

Back in Update #42, Dungeon 6 was marked as Yellow but is now marked as Red. The reason for this is D6 is one of the most important dungeons in the entire game as it marks the point where the plot goes totally off the rails and the mystery of the story deepens, sort of like the season 1 finale or episode “Not What He Seems” of the Gravity Falls TV series. Since Update #42, I realized that for how important it was, I wasn’t satisfied with the dungeon in its current state and decided to basically redo it. Even though it would take more time, I decided this was a small price to pay for an overall better finished product. This game is my passion project, tribute to Gravity Falls and gift to its amazing fandom, so I want to make sure I give it nothing less than 110% so you guys get the absolute best game possible!

The good news is that once D6 (which is currently taking priority) is finished, I’ll be able to also complete the next three dungeons very quickly afterward, since all that’s left is to finish programming them by adding in their monsters/bosses, treasure chests and cutscenes. At the moment, my goal is to have D6 through D9 be marked as Green by the end of 2018.

If I can meet this goal, we could be looking at a Q1 2019 release for the full game. That’s a best case scenario however and assumes I’m correct in estimating the amount of work that still needs to be done, which if you’ve been following the development of this game for a long time, you know that I’m very VERY terrible at guessing how long things take. Still, fingers crossed for luck!

One last thing I want to mention in this update is an issue that brought to my attention via TV Tropes, and read as follows:

• Scrappy Mechanic: The fact that any random encounter is faster than your characters unless you take a long time to level-grind. Once the dungeons become bigger, exploring them or even level-grinding become tedious because you’ll have to pause after each battle to heal, and any monster that uses a Status Ailment-inducing attack will be an annoyance to deal with. Characters like Pacifica become less useful because of it, as given the fact that the opponents will attack first no matter what, debuffing them or inflicting a Status Ailment on them isn’t gainful and it’s better to hit them with your strongest attacks to reduce their numbers as quickly as possible. (Note that this doesn’t apply to bosses. Buffing and debuffing is near indispensable to survive boss fights.)

This wasn’t something I happened to notice during my own testing (which is why I’m so lucky to have players give me feedback like this!) so with that in mind I went back and what do you know, starting from pretty much the 2nd dungeon onward, enemies are nearly always faster than the player! Checking the agility stats of all the current in-game enemies from D2 onward, I said to myself “Holy Moses, that’s WAY higher than I remember programming!” and immediately gave every enemy in the game (except bosses) a significant agility nerf.

In all likelihood the demo version will not be updated to reflect this change (as the high agility enemies don’t make the game unplayable, just a bit harder), but expect the problem of players almost never getting first strikes to be solved in the full version. There’s actually one other notable mechanic currently in the demo that’s going to be changed (or rather, removed entirely) in the final game, but I’ll save discussing that for another update.

Thank you for following the development of PinesQuest 2D and may the rest of your October be spooktacular! As always, stay weird, fellow Fallers!