Hello everyone! Parker here, coming at you with another update on the development of Steel Soul: A Fractured RPG. Lemme give you a quick rundown of what I've been up to.

Now before I begin, I've realised that I never explicitly stated what the primary gameplay entails, so I'm gonna get that out of the way so the rest of this post makes some amount of sense. At its core, there are two types of gameplay: investigation and combat. In investigation segments, you examine the scenes of crimes to deduce what happened at them, and combat is... well, combat; the standard turn-based affair we all know and love.

Now, with that out of the way, here's a quick rundown of what I've been up to:

• Rebalanced combat to make it feel more fair, yet still challenging

• Worked on creating a new mechanic in which the player gains new skills for completing investigations and other side quests

• Wrote a couple new music tracks and diegetic pieces

• Finished the first draft of the main plot, which will likely be reworked/expanded upon in the future

• Recorded a few minutes of developer commentary for the content I already have

Now then, let's attack these one at a time.

REBALANCED COMBAT

For a while now, I felt the combat was a bit too unfair for the player, which I learned was in large part to the way guns were designed. I made them in a way that makes them powerful but hard to land hits with, which worked for a while, but in time they began to feel frustrating. I increased their accuracy by a small amount, which seems to have fixed the issue for me, at least.

INVESTIGATIONS

I've added a mechanic where upon successfully completing certain investigations or quests, the main character Freya will learn a new skill. This helped give investigations a purpose other than moving the plot forward, and in a video game, that's kind of important, haha.

NEW MUSIC

Now I can't actually show any of the new tracks I've written, but know I've been told that they're pretty damn good. I'm excited to show 'em off, whenever I get to do that.

PLOT DRAFT

So believe it or not, I've been working without a finalised plot for a while now. It's not really in my nature to plan things out before I do them, but I did wanna make sure I knew what I was doing with this one, so I put a Google Doc together. I'm pretty happy with it!

DEVELOPER COMMENTARY

Because I'm doing this for college, I need to record all of my processes. So, as a remedy for this, I've started implementing an in-game developer commentary. Basically, I just stole the idea from Valve's developer commentary stuff. No particular reason behind that, I just like Valve.

And that's pretty much everything. One more note before I go: I've almost got enough content to post a demo! The game is still very rough at the minute, but hopefully if I manage to keep up the work, I'll be able to give you all sometimes to sink your teeth into. It'll likely be around an hour of content (give or take), so it'll be good to get some feedback on the game and take notes of what I can improve upon. I'm looking forward to sharing it with you all.

Thank you for reading, and have a good one!

~ Parker