Looking out on approaching deadlines, we believe that our progress has been coming along quite well.

With the basics of the gameplay out of the way and all major design decisions put rightfully in the past tense, we're eager to moving on to the finer details of Deity's Form.  Our first major question was what we needed for our upcoming move out of Pre-Alpha. Something we've been sorely missing is the gameplay structure we want Deity's Form to actually follow. As it stands, its an endless string of rooms that chip away at the players health rather than any structured form of progression. So, to move a bit closer to the dungeon progression we've got planned we're working on getting a solid level working. That leads into two other things we've been planning to implement, one of which we've already got implemented on the programming end of things. A beginning and end. 

Bosses! What dungeon is complete without a big old boss monster to stab until one of you stops moving. Building onto the core gameplay loop of the form switching combat, our design for the first boss of Deity's Form would be a hybrid of two of the enemy types, requiring the player to switch forms multiple times to effectively combat them.  Narratively, these hybrid enemies would be commanders stationed around the prison, building into their abilities to buff and call in extra enemies to serve as further fodder to slow you down.  With the commander out of the way, the player will have an opportunity to escape their eternal prison. On the other side of endings, the player dying. We decided that it aided the narrative if the player weren't ever killed. Instead, simply beaten into a state of unconsciousness before being taken away to a cell, one that will hopefully hold you this time. We chose this as it lined up with the core concept of the player being this powerful, nigh unkillable creature. If they could have killed you, they would have done it by now. This opened up a number of new possibilities for how exactly we were going to structure new runs.

Perhaps you are destined to do this forever, so long as your will remains unbroken. A common trend among roguelike runs is starting a fresh run with only the base stats and equipment and making the most with what you have.  With our narrative of the player being on the same life every time, how can we justify that when the pickups aren't physical equipment? We found a workaround and an interesting take on the idea of a 'New Game+' of sorts. When the player is captured, they are given two options. The first option is to 'Bide their time', this would be the player waiting in their cell patiently for another opportunity to escape, allowing for enough time that the toll of their desolation to wear away their powers and give them that standard roguelike fresh run. The other option, however, is to 'Break their chains', this would be the player trying to break out again immediately. This would allow the player to attempt another run, starting with full health from their cell with all of the pickups they had collected in their previous run. However, due to the recent breakout attempt, the guards would still be on high alert. Depending on how far the player got in their previous run, enemies would be tougher and more varied from earlier in the dungeon, increasing the difficulty proportionally to represent the level of alert their currently on. This would allow players who had a really lucky run but made one too many mistakes try again with what they managed to gather without having to rely on luck.