Biweekly Progress Report - 3-16-2026 (Blaster Stats UI, lots of cutscene/VO work, and Partner Abilities)
Hey everyone! It's been another 2 weeks, which means it's time for a progress report!
Last update, my sleep had gotten REALLY bad and was really messing with me. It's definitely gotten better since then, though I still have some bad nights here and there, so my productivity isn't quite back to full speed yet. Still, it's moving in the right direction and I'm pretty happy with how the past two weeks went overall, so let's get into it!
First off, here's our Daily Updates since the last progress report:
The main things I've been working on are, as mentioned in the title, the Blaster Stats page, a lot of cutscene work, and the new mechanic I mentioned last week - Partner Abilities! I'll talk more about them later in the post, but for now, let's take a look at Blaster Stats!
I've had the idea in my head for a long time to have a visual representation of what your blaster setup is good at, and this is what I came up with! It's pretty self-explanatory for the most part; damage is how much damage it does, speed is how quickly it fires, range is how far the bullets travel, and utility is a sort of catchall for the less easily definable things not covered by the others, such as area coverage, piercing, efficiency at generating Force Shot ammo during combat, and things like that. The stats are updated in real time as you change your equipped Shot and Trigger types, as you can see in the gif, and the bars are color coded going from blue, to green, to yellow, to pink, based on how high the stat is. Hopefully this will help everyone understand what each blaster part does better without needing to experiment ingame, but more than anything I honestly just think it's really fun to look at!
Aside from that, I did a handful of more minor things: I added a new color palette for Alicia based on the regular Alraune, placed shortcut ladders in a few places around the Summit, tweaked an interaction between the Ledge Vault and Hoverjets Sprint mechanics to make platforming flow better, and finally, made it so destructible walls blown up by the Force Shot are now permanently destroyed, rather than respawning next time you come back, making exploration smoother than ever.
I also did a lot of work on cutscenes. I got back the first batch of recordings from Kara's new VA (which covers all of the new and altered scripts so far), so we finally have all the voice acting we need to finish up the story rework! I've been going through and picking out takes, as well as doing the necessary audio editing to prepare them for use ingame. In general, that'll be our major focus going forward, since it's the last major thing left before we can release v0.49. It'll still be a bit, as the second half of this story rework has a lot more alterations than the first half we already released, but I can't wait to get it in your hands - and finally get to start making BRAND NEW content after that!
Finally, before finishing up this progress report, let me give a brief explanation of the new mechanic I'm adding, Partner Abilities!
Essentially, Partner Abilities are a new action Alicia can perform once they're unlocked that calls upon the powers of one of the game's many characters. Only one ability can be equipped at a time, and is completely free to use, with a cooldown between uses. Each character has their own ability and cooldown durations; I won't go into all of the abilities for now, but I will show off the one that's been implemented so far, Kara's.
It might be a little harder to tell what's going on without audio (I want to improve the visuals some more later), but basically, when Alicia uses Kara's partner ability, the enemy that has the highest HP onscreen will be targeted by an unavoidable sniper shot. It deals extremely high damage, but has a 20 second cooldown between shots (which can be seen next to Alicia's healthbar in the upper left), so it's best used to strategically deal with high-priority enemies.
Other characters will have completely different Partner Abilities, either attacking in a different way, or doing something more defensive or healing oriented. They'll only be swappable at save points, but are free to switch once you've unlocked them, so it'll be up to you what kind of ability you want access to at any given time. You won't unlock most characters' Partner Abilities the first time you meet them, though, so don't expect everyone's abilities to be obtainable just yet when v0.49 comes out!
Alright, I think that's about it for this update! The next few might not have a lot of visuals to show off, since we'll be focusing as much as possible on cutscene work that I can't really talk about or show off to avoid spoilers, but we'll be continuing to stream at least twice a week if you want to see some of that early. In any case, thank you all so very much for reading, and we'll see you again in two weeks with the next progress report!