Blade Prince Academy Windows game

Hey Blades Princes,

Happy New Year (we’re still in January!), and we hope you had lovely holidays! Let's celebrate the new year with a devblog on what we’ve been up to and how development is progressing. Time to tackle some of the biggest features we’ve been focusing on and what changed. Our topics for today’s devblog are the relationship and combo systems. They are quite significant in terms of gameplay, and you may have noticed some parts of them during the playtest between November and December.

The influence of the relationship system on the gameplay

The relationship system plays a crucial role in shaping the dynamics of the Blade Princes, while also affecting their powers. As you increase relationships between them, they unlock various benefits. When characters are together on a mission, they gain bonus stats. Additionally, each level of relationship brings not only stat bonuses but also triggers visual novel events between the two characters. At the maximum relationship level between two characters, you will have access to a final visual novel scene, but you will also benefit from the highest stat bonus possible and obtain a powerful item known as a "Memory", akin to a "Pact", but much more powerful.

The relationship system is designed to add more depth to the lives of the Academy and the Blade Princes’. It’s also a way to let you see your progress and the impact of your decisions—who you decided to team up with and if you wanted to nurture your character's relationships. So, as you can guess, you earn relationship points by playing with your selected Blade Princes in missions and engaging in the available dialogues in the Park, at the Academy Hub.

The relationship gauge is cut into levels and gradually fills. At each level, you can access personalized relationship dialogues for each Blade Prince duo. This system rewards you for progressing with your favorite characters by granting bonus stats. Once you fill out the gauge, you will be able to choose between "True Friendship" and "True Love", providing you with a unique and powerful relationship Pact depending on your choice.

Synergies based on alterations, the roots of the combo mechanics

It may feel out of topic, but it’s still linked to your character's connections in a way. Combos have improved quite a bit in the past few months. Spell combos are built around synergies between characters. There are 10 alterations in the game, and each Blade Prince can cast 3 to 4 of them. They are the conditions that make a combo possible. We made sure to have synergies between each character, every character needs another to launch a combo.

Specific alterations are required, depending on the characters and attacks you choose. The Tactical pause mode highlights enemies with the right combination of alterations, and the Blade Princes with available combos are outlined in gold. Successfully executing a combo triggers visual effects like a screen shake and a prominent "COMBO" message to reward your tactical moves and emphasize the boosted damage inflicted.

This has been a matter that required multiple iterations to make sure that it was easily and visually understood when you met the right conditions to trigger a combo with which character, which spell, and which enemies. The feature needed some visual emphasis for this purpose, and we believe we found the right solution for this!

On top of this, you may have noticed that we decided to make the difference between damage-dealing spells, healing spells, and buff spells more visible by adding a colored filter depending on the category (red for damage, green for heal, blue for buff, and yellow for affliction).

The evolution of the dialogues and the creation of the Park

The development of the Park was influenced by the need for new panels in the Academy Hub, stemming from the rework of the Blade Princes into more unique heroes and the removal of panels like Recruitment and the Cemetery. The suppression of these panels changed, on a deeper level, how the dynamics between characters worked.

And so it was born! The Park dialogues quickly took the form of choice dialogues for narrative purposes and to give you some actions to take narratively. But we were still facing one issue: when designing the Park, we came to realize that the choices at the end of a mission didn't work anymore.

The dialogues at the end of missions were still in the game, made for less unique heroes at the time, which means they weren't as personalized. As much as we liked this feature, we understood it didn’t fit in the game anymore. Originally, these were meant to let you gain relationship points, back when the Park wasn't even here.

We’ve worked hard on the Park and its new dialogues, which are designed for much more unique heroes and personalities and are significantly upgraded versions of the end-of-mission dialogues we had before. They are personalized, better written, and allow the development of relationships outside of missions.

So there you have it! The changes we made in the system required a new way of developing your characters' relationships outside of missions, which took the form of the Park. And to maintain narration and dialogue quality, we chose to remove the old choice dialogues at the end of missions.

In terms of UI, this has changed quite a bit as well. The Academy Hub features two main panels related to relationships:

• The Relationships screen: This is where you can check information on the relationship status between Blade Princes and the details of the bonuses they unlocked. It serves as an informational space, centered around gameplay and management.
• The Park: The Park doesn’t display key management information. It’s a narrative-driven space where you can interact with clickable head icons of your Blade Princes. Doing so triggers visual novel scenes with choices, allowing you to win relationship points. The background of the Park is quite different from the other panels as it represents the real park of the Academy, adding more charm to this narrative space and creating a different atmosphere to set it even more apart from more tactical screens like the Black Mage Altar, for example. Oh, and some characters that you can’t play might appear occasionally…

Phew, this was quite a big devblog, there was a lot to share and break down as various systems are intertwined. Thank you for reading, let us know what you think about these recent changes!

Keep an eye out for upcoming news and insights into the creation of Blade Prince Academy. More updates are on the way!

- The Blade Prince Academy Team -