Hey everybody!
We are now close to the Christmas break and things are getting really busy. Everything needs to be wrapped up in a way… be it university projects or presents.
And yes, for CrossCode we have something to wrap up as well: our milestone for the end of 2013. Hopefully we will find some time between the holidays.
So, what was done the last two weeks? We finally added a couple of new cutscenes, added another battle tech and did a lot of planning.
Cutscenes
Well, not much to tell here. Here’s the part that took the longest time to do:

…Yes, taking the elevator with an NPC. Blame the physics!
Also here some screenshot with an excerpt of a dialog for speculations and stuff:
So yes: With this update the play time of CrossCode finally increased, if ever so slightly…
New Battle Tech
We already presented two ball throwing battle techs at our last update. This time we got one for close combat:

It’s probably not hard to guess the inspiration here. :P
Talent Tree Planning
CrossCode will feature a talent tree used to learn quite a large number of passive talents as well as battle techs. GFlügel took the initiative this time, throwing large, number-overloaded spreadsheets at us… all for planning our talent trees in more detail. Oh and there’s a LOT to plan: number of talents, talent cost, distribution among the different trees (there is one per element and a neutral one) and so on…
So thanks to the power of spreadsheets we now got a pretty clear picture of our talent tree at least in terms of amount of talents and distribution. I’m pretty sure we’ll adapt the actual content of the talent trees continuously over the course of development. After all, this is critical for good balancing.
Other Things
R.D. improved several details on the equipment menu which is getting close to completion. Now he helps on the map graphics side, improving the layout and graphics of the cabins.
And that’s it for this weekly!
We will post the next update early next year and it will be a big one! We’ll present a summary of all changes in 2013 with video content and everything! … Now this will be a bit more work and since we have holidays in between, it might take a bit longer for us to prepare this update, just so that you know!
Till next time!
Nice