Punching Fridays #4

Welcome once again to another issue of Punching Fridays! This week I have a few awesome announcements to make. Let's get started.

Everyone, please welcome the first official team member to join Punching Donut Games, TheCrassDragon! TCD is a very talented writer and historian who will be helping me to polish the games story, character backstories and various other game elements! He has already begun writing and preplanning certain aspects of the game that have simply blown me away. I have been reading his ideas and lore for a few weeks now and honestly, I can not wait for you all to see where things are going in the near future. On that subject I want to take this time to point out a few changes that you can expect in upcoming releases.

Pictured Above:

- New allies coming very soon. Ivy is living honey and a hand-to-hand fighter. Strider is a travelling bard with the ability to mind control anything that hears her lute playing. Harlow is a buddhist werewolf that will be assisting Korvald in some future dealings with the revived Iron Abbey.

Upcoming Changes and Expectations:

- Even though the official timeline is never revealed currently in-game, it has been implied that this story takes place around 890 A.D.. This will actually be changing to a previous century and will be explicitly indicated in game via an entirely new, detailed, and much longer introduction.

- Expansion of the game's intro story, including the ability to walk around Toft as an elderly (non-eldritch infused) Korvald, and interact with the very people he ended up fighting to avenge. This includes his wife, Hyldr (renamed from Herja, you will understand why later).

- Korvald's entire backstory will finally begin to be revealed. I will not reveal very much at this point but I can say that if you are a fan of Norse mythology then you are in for an amazing retelling of characters you are familiar with.

- Qhroth'un, Noraitha and all of the other eldritch entities you have become familiar with will also begin revealing their origins. This includes historical intersections between the old Gods and humans. I said before that I wanted this story to blur the lines between folklore, religion and history, and you will soon get to see what that means exactly.

- Reignvoldt's character will be changing slightly, only in name and motivation though.

- An entirely new group of human military opposition will be introduced soon to replace Templars. Templars are being revised and will be reassigned to later stages of the game.

- I am planning on removing the XP/Level system in the game in favor of progress driven advancement and equipment based increases in power. This will actually allow me to better maintain specific levels of resistance throughout the game, rather than letting players level to 999 and faceroll everything.

- The world map is being dramatically expanded on, with a metric shitload of new areas and secrets being planned as I write this!

- Allies will soon serve a greater purpose than simply stomping on your enemies. We are planning unique perks for each ally that can serve a variety of purposes like unlocking/accessing specific areas, influencing aspects of the story/interactions, and even granting special buffs.

- New mechanics and puzzles are being added to new and existing areas. Aim able arrow shots for hitting out of reach switches, pushing/pulling huge objects to open/close passages, puzzle doors and as mentioned above, ally based puzzles will be widely utilized.

- New talents are coming!

- The ability to upgrade existing weapons/armor to greatly increase their stats.

- Voice acting! (this will be discussed in a future PF blog post).

- Minigames! I am working on adding fishing, farming and drinking minigames that you can optionally undertake if you so choose.

Rogue Dungeon:

- The "date" dungeon is currently being completely reimagined and has been removed from the current release. In an upcoming update you will discover a new evil that is attempting to devour our world and must be fought back from the inside out. The belly of this beast will be the new rogue dungeon. Each complete run through the dungeon will cause a spreading infection across the land to retreat just a bit. Ignoring this infection for a long period of time however will allow it to grow and infect the enemies you encounter making them far more lethal than they should be. I will be diving into greater detail of this whole new aspect of the game shortly before it is ready for release so look forward to that.