ども皆さん！

I'm here with the second monthly devlog. Today, I'm discussing party management, exploration as well as some difficulties I'm facing. But let's start with something exciting! I am changing the official cover art for Hololive Isekai. Check out this cover art done by our talented artist, who is also in charge of drawing the different portraits you see in the narrative sections.

A word from our artist: Hi, I'm Maruseu. I'm working as one of the artists on Hololive Isekai and I'm very excited to be working in a team with similar influences and interests. You can follow me on Twitter and Pixiv where I post my artworks.

Four's a Party. Eight's a Crowd.

Let's talk about party management. I want players to be able to play as their favourite Hololivers, see all the abilities the Hololiver is capable of in the game as well as what sort of memes and jokes their skills would reference. But at the same time, I want players to make meaningful decisions regarding which characters they can bring out to adventure with them. Initially, I planned to have players to have 4 characters in their active party, and all the characters they have recruited stored in the reserve, which then can be swapped in/out at any point during the battle.

This was the original party menu, where players can scroll through a list of icons at the bottom to choose which character they want to swap in with.

However, I realised that as the player progresses, they would have an increasing pool of reserve characters they can swap in and out with, which can lead to a huge balance issue, as currently, I plan to put all Hololive JP idols (up to 4th generation) into the game as playable characters. So. I've decided to limit the number of characters a player can bring into an adventure. Currently, players can bring up to 8 characters into an adventure with them, 4 characters will be in the active party, and the other 4 will be in the reserve.

This is the current party window's design. The current party window design is still not finalized and I will continue to further improve the user interface as I develop the game.

Exploring the Unknown

Another feature that has been implemented is the story sections of the game, which was mentioned in the second work-in-progress log. I've planned it to be similar to a visual novel style of delivery, and with the help of a talented programmer, we got it working in the game. 

The plan initially was a simple a game-loop. Story > Battle > Story > Battle. However, I've realised that this method of gameplay can be exhausting for players over time, so I've decided to add an exploration mode into the game, as kind of buffer between story segments and battle segments. It's not a very intricate feature. A simple overview map where players can control the characters in moving left or right. Players will be able to interact with items on the map to read some additional lore, solve small puzzles, or maybe find collectibles. The breadth of things players can do is not yet set in stone yet, but I'm excited to explore more of what I can do with this feature.

This new feature was not originally in the plans, so with this new addition, development of version 0.2 has been slightly delayed. But, I do believe that this exploration segment will enhance the gameplay experience overall. It will also open up new gameplay options for me to explore in the future.

Development Difficulties

In the beginning, developing this game was a fun little experiment. However, as I continue to develop the game, I continuously find more features that I want to add in to improve the game experience. I have to constantly stop myself from adding too many features, because ultimately, Hololive Isekai is still a fan game, and with very limited resources, I cannot do a lot of things. I still have a group of volunteers that have very kindly offer some help with the game and I can develop the game at such a breakneck pace was all thanks to their help. 

Currently, I'm at the stage where I'm facing some technical difficulties in coding certain aspects of the game and to add to that, my day job is starting to get hectic. I feel like I won't be able to put in as much time as I want in developing Hololive Isekai, so I ask for your understanding if development feels slow in the coming future. I'm putting as much time as I can into developing the game and sometimes, I really wish I can make this my full time job instead.

Closing

Version 0.2 will include story segments, exploration, additional battle scenarios, as well as Flare as a playable character. A demo version has been planned to release sometime in September, I hope everyone looks forward to that. I appreciate feedback on the new features that will be added into the game! 

Once again, I'd like to thank everyone for supporting me in the development on Hololive Isekai and left comments on the work-in-progress posts. I hope you enjoy Yumei's presentations. As always, I am eternally grateful to my wonderful team for volunteering their time, giving me additional feedback for the game and overall, being such nice and flexible people to work with.

Hololive Isekai is a passion project and we are working on this on our own time. We do not represent COVER Corp or Hololive Productions.

Thank you for supporting Hololive Isekai.