Post release. Life continues.
I've found myself sitting down to work on Etheldia just out of habit a lot this week, so I ended up getting quite a lot done despite wanting to take a break.
I fixed a few minor bugs in the game and a couple of small typos people pointed out so I put up a patch for that. Since then I've made a few quality of life improvements, for instance when recruiting a character already in your beastiary you'll be given the option to keep it or release it immediately back into the wild. Due to the nature of the storage setup I've gone with it would be really awkward to add a release feature so this should help players who want to gain a lot of recruit exp without ending up with a mountain of characters. The function to sort the speed of characters and determine turn order wasn't working exactly as I wanted so I've fixed that too.
I also added a nuzlocke challenge mode to the game, to spice up repeat playthroughs and test players. For those not familiar with the concept, a nuzlocke is a form of challenge popular in the Pokemon community where you can only recruit the first character in each route, each character is named to promote bond forming and if a character faints they're considered "dead" and can't be used anymore.
While a nuzlocke is just a player managed thing in a Pokemon game, in Etheldia Pepper I've fully integrated it into the game. When creating a new file there's an option to play the nuzlocke mode, and the challenge will continue until the main character faints, whereupon the game will revert to a regular file. Any characters that "died" along the challenge will be in the players storage and they're able to continue the game as a regular file if they desire. The bonus for completing a nuzlocke run is a special ability at the end of the game! And a sense of accomplishment.
I haven't had a chance to test the mode yet but I imagine it'll be pretty difficult to complete, especially as after defeating the 4th elder legendaries begin to appear in random encounters. I don't have a date yet for the update but I imagine it'll probably be in the next few days after I've made sure I haven't introduced any bugs.
