The last of the twenty-four skills went in

This is a progress log. Two weeks of it went into skills, and all 24 are in.

Six per class. You summon them with Seals, merge the duplicates into levels, and bind one to a squad slot — the binding is to the slot, so changing the body standing in it leaves the skill where it is. A squad may carry a skill once, which means four agents bring four different skills.

The skills screen with the squad's loadout above the catalogue, a skill detail sheet reading its rule and level, and a skill firing on the battle field.

Every one of them resolves in the battle engine, and the fight shows it — the cast on the silhouette, a shield draining on its own bar, a heal landing on the body it was aimed at, a fallen agent standing back up.

A skill is not a bigger number

Each one carries a permanent bonus to two stats, and if that were all it carried I would have built gear twice. Most of the 24 carry a rule of their own.

Two of them:

Terminal Clause: No single hit can kill the agent carrying it. The blow lands and leaves it standing on 1 HP. It re-arms three turns later, and until it does, the next hit kills.
Hard Reset: Tech damage to every enemy, and every enemy skill drops back to full cooldown. Land it on the turn their heavy skills come up and they lose that round.

That is where a build stops being a stat total. A wall that cannot be one-shot changes what the other side has to bring, and a squad-wide passive takes the strongest single source, so stacking copies of it buys nothing.

Two weeks

The catalogue, the summon and its odds, the merge, the two sheets, art for all 24 tiles, the cast path through the engine, and then the same 24 again in the replay and on the battle screen. Longest stretch on one system so far. I am counting on it having been worth it.

What I am building now

Operations and chat both have their design system and their technical plan finished, and both are going into the client now.

The Operations board with four daily jobs and a Blank Permit above them, and the zone board with lines from other syndicates.

Operations is a daily board. Four jobs, each opened by its own permit, and a Blank Permit where you write the payout yourself and the opposition scales to it. A run you lose hands the permit back; the Blank one keeps it.

Chat is the zone board. Every line you post lights a beacon over your syndicate, and while it burns anyone reading can come for you. There is one more thing in it that I am not describing yet.

The landing page

I rebuilt it too. It now walks the game chapter by chapter — headquarters, agents, fabrication, skills, campaign, operations, chat — with a clip out of the current build under each one.

Next: both of those, running in the game.