"No plan survives contact with the enemy". That's a bit dramatic considering that to my knowledge nobody is trying to kill me for developing a video game in my free time, but it's still a fitting phrase to encapsulate how our plans often don't coincide with the conditions in the real world when said plan is to be put into action. 

What I'm trying to say is that this devlog is coming out later than anticipated because of personal issues. I don't really have deadlines to meet besides those set by yours truly, but I still wanted to address the delay. Anyways, time for some progress.

It's clear that readability remains an issue for new players. Last DD I added a visual effect for a mechanic unique to an early game enemy faction. The fact that this was met by surprise means that nobody even realized this mechanic existed up until now. 

One piece of advice I received a while ago was adding portraits to generic enemies since that would make turn order more evident. I rejected the idea thinking it would take too long, but I wanted to draw a couple to see how it would go and it ended up taking only a couple days, possibly because I've been drawing a lot lately. 

In short, every enemy in the demo has a unique portrait now. 

I like some of the portraits more than others, but as a whole I think they represent a net positive and now it should be much easier to tell whose turn it is. I still need to make a proper tutorial or something along those lines, but I'm not sure how. My solution up to this point has been to have easy enemies at the beginning.

Besides that I don't have a lot of progress I would like to share. I have fixed some bugs that were reported recently and I've been working on more content and such but I don't feel like spoiling it just yet.

The final thing I want to say is that this devlog is a double failure when it comes to timing because I wanted to have my Steam page up by now, but I didn't realize that Valve takes a couple of days to manually check your store page the first time you publish it. Oops.

Still, I didn't want to delay this post even further so I'll shill it for sure next time. Until then, farewell and please tell me if my art sucks. 

Afterlife Gladiator on Steam! Woooh!