New year, new build. I listed most of the changes in the description on the game's main page, but I'll go through them here one by one.

• Rebalanced everything, and rewrote most of the battle system logic

Up until like 1 or 2 weeks ago, the game's balance never felt very good to me. On a whim, I ended up basically copy/pasting Pokémon's stat/damage calculations into the game. I did at least tweak them to suit Logue's needs, of course. The end result feels way better to both me, and my "testers" (aka me). I fully expect to spend more time fine tuning things for future builds, but I think that the math is in a solid spot right now.

• Added some more books, spells, and items

Honestly, I'm not sure if I added more spells. And I think I only added like 1 or two new books. But there are some new items. One class of new items is vials, which are the same as seeds from Dragon Quest. Or vitamins from Pokémon, if you prefer. Then there are shreep, which are dream sheep that you can collect. They give you more dream dust at the end of runs. Finally, there's everything else like hover boots, the stopwatch, and probably one or two others. I did add bombs, but they don't work yet. Gotta leave something for the beta build.

• Added shields as a new type of item

Shields are my answer to the question of "why would anyone ever use defend in battle"? Their functionality was inspired by the bonus heal effect that you get when you defend in The Legend of Dragoon. There's not too much to say about these, but I think that they're neat.

• Added special abilities tied to different books

I had to add these to make the new explosion book work, and I'm glad that I did. The gist is that they're basically abilities in Pokémon--passive effects that are tied to a book. Similar to how books already had pages that modified your base stats, these pages can do stuff like make all spells cost 1 MP, or heal you 1 HP whenever you take a step. I've only scratched the surface with implementing these, but there's a lot of potential to be tapped.

• Added an achievement system (badges)

I'm a big sucker for achievements, so it was only a matter of time until I added these. They work exactly how you'd expect. And the good news for me is that they'll make it really easy to add Retro Achievements integration once the game is done.

• ...And a card game that utilized them

Each achievement that you unlock also unlocks a corresponding badge that you can use in a card game called Badge Bash. It's basically Triple Triad. More specifically, it's a port job of a game jam game that I made called Double Dyad. Like achievements, I love card games, so I just had to work one in somehow. My only regret is that the game is only barely unique. I'm not a very good card game designer lol.

• Added a gacha system for unlocking new skins and items

Not much to say about this one. It took a lot of work to do the graphics/animations for this one. That's something. Also, this build already starts you off with every unlockable skin, so the skin gacha machine is useless. In future builds, I think I want to convert the machines to use an evolving cost/odds formula like the machines in Melee and the Minish Cap.

• Added a pause menu for use in the overworld that has its own full set of functionalities

It's an all in one menu where you can basically change and access anything and everything. That's it. Can you tell that I'm running out of typing energy?

• Players can now dive into their own dream and do some non-dungeony stuff in there

This spot might have some lore significance later, but for now it's just a place to access the gacha machines and play Badge Bash.

• Lots of other tiny tweaks

Can you discover them all yourself?

Now that this build is done, I'm going to be setting my sights on the beta build. I think that the game is mature enough at this point to where I need to start looking for a dedicated artist and audio person. Once I get that all sorted out and we finish a beta build, I think that that'll be the time to secure a publishing deal and/or try my hand at doing a kickstarter. Ideally, a beta build would take under 6 months, but who knows? I certainly didn't expect this alpha 2.0 build to take 4 months. For reference, both the prototype build and the alpha 1.0 build took about 2.5 months each.

So yeah, we'll see how things go from here.