June 2024 - Status and Reactions

Dark Sky

Dark Sky is a narrative RPG deckbuilder that features tactical combat and a branching card upgrade system. Assemble your party, customize your deck, and harness powerful synergies to master strategic battles as you unravel the mystery behind a planetary catastrophe.

Greetings, For this month’s developer update we wanted to focus on the systems that we have been working hard at refining and putting together. To give more context, we received great feedback about the ignite status effect reaction from those who played the demo and wanted to further expand on this to create more synergies between party members and builds. Now we have seven reactions! How it works: Some status effects interact with each other. When a unit is affected by both, a powerful reaction can occur, clearing all stacks of the statuses involved in the reaction. So today we’ll walk you through some of the new actions and what statuses you’ll need to make them happen. [b]Short Circuit:[/b] Static + Corrosion/Sticky Effect: Short Circuit causes an explosion that deals 3 damage to the unit and applies 2 Static to all adjacent units (including diagonals). [b]Sick:[/b] Poison + Static/Corrosion Effect: At the Start and End of the turn, this unit will take 2 Potent damage. (damage that bypasses all defenses) Lose one stack at the end of the turn. 3 Stacks. [b]Exposed:[/b] Vulnerable + Blind/Slow Effect: Whenever this unit receives damage, double it, then lower one stack. 3 stacks. [b]Frail:[/b] Blind + Slow/Sticky Effect: The next time this unit would deal damage, it deals 0 damage instead. [b]Boosted:[/b] Power + Energized Effect: The next attack played will cast twice if able (second cast is free). [b]Relaxed:[/b] Regen + Impervious Effect: The next skill played will cast twice if able (second cast is free). In addition to these status effect reactions, we have also implemented a few other major updates and features: [b]Ability to respec your build[/b] - Sometimes you might be tempted to try a different build to play around a new card or character, or simply out of curiosity! So now, after a certain point in the game, you will be able to respec your characters whenever you visit the Ukh’s shop. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/41495898/98b312057358e0157c8246a7cc4355fa4211ceeb.png[/img] [b]Preview enemy intents [/b] After a lot of testing and feedback, we realized that having more detailed information about the enemy’s turn allowed us for deeper interaction with the movement system and opened up more interesting decisions during our turn. So added enemy intent cards to expose all their moves. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/41495898/81f73db445d01b6b51316352470a2c9c187f1f06.png[/img] [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/41495898/4c495cda59fa6e29c931e3ca7f43864d5b872678.png[/img] [b]Combat UX/UI Updates[/b] Our combat UI was due some updates. Among these changes we designed a new energy counter to make it easier to track energy consumption. And we improved the party placement UI to show the characters’ HP and saved loadouts with all their cards. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/41495898/9f88f14e2ce1795d56d1d5af200d12bc05d89581.png[/img] [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/41495898/c6528f84a0c93af16b898ac51f3c9b326f0b3719.png[/img] That's it for this month’s developer update! We've been hard at work refining the game's systems and integrating your feedback. We’re thrilled to share the new status effect reactions, enemy intents, and UX/UI updates we've implemented. And keep an eye out for our upcoming gameplay trailer - we can’t wait for you to see it! - Dark Sky Team