Choosing Yarrow as your Spirit Companion offers you a new passive and a new ultimate. The passive is: When Ember uses her Magic, Yarrow attaches three Blood Bags to the enemy you struck. After that point, any damage you do to that enemy damages them and heals you.
When Ember uses her Ultimate, these Blood Bags are applied to all enemies in the encounter and then Ember's turn ends. But here's the thing, the Ultimate isn't done! Yarrow summons a Sand Vortex, and for the next twelve seconds, the vortex continues to damage all enemies near Ember. And yes, this will proc all of the Blood Bags you have applied to enemies.
One of the things about this I'm most excited about is a piece of equipment that will appear when you go on runs with Yarrow. I call it Yarrow's Sorrow. When you choose it, killing an enemy while Yarrow's ultimate is active will deal a burst of damage, re-apply Blood Bags to all enemies, and reset the duration of the Sand Vortex. If you can continue to kill enemies during this, you can extend the duration indefinitely.
Next let's talk about Solara, the Sun God and end boss. I've been working on her abilities and I now have the first four. She's going to be more complicated than the previous bosses, because of course I want to have a satisfying final boss battle. I put together a process/timelapse video of my work getting one of her attacks working. Check it out:
Having already created two attacks that required a lot of skill and reaction time from players, I wanted to make one that was on the simpler side. Players are only required to run in a straight line to avoid this attack. That can be easier said than done when there are other things to avoid in the game, (traps, spikes, elemental pools!) but for the most part this is a chill attack.
Pro tip: All of Solara's attacks critically hit, and parrying her does not cancel her attacks like it does with other enemies. She doesn't use attacks that you haven't seen elsewhere in the game before that point, but they're a bit more complex and the penalty for missing your parries and dodges is more severe.
One last thing I want to share:
As of now, the entire Constellation Grid is completed! You have no idea how good it feels to have a whole feature 100% complete. I won't have to do anything else but fix bugs. It's one of the best feelings a game developer can have. And one of the things I did to get it to that point is add 12 brand new abilities to it that you can unlock. Here are some of my favorites:
- Ascendant Ultimate. Recharging your stamina via Meditation also charges your Ultimate. If you get really good at charging with Stamina you can be the Ultimate God.
- Double Action Trigger. Hit the same enemy with a trigger twice in a row to deal a burst of extra damage. This one was inspired by a game I released in 2014.
- Treacherous Strike. The lower damage Ember is, the more Back Attack damage she deals. The highest the multiplier can go is 3x, so if you want to ride the red line you can deal some serious damage with this one.
Thanks again for following along with development. Your feedback is really important, and as an example of how important it is check out these release notes for a recent bugfix of our demo. All of the items from that came from player feedback. If you played and especially if you enjoyed the demo, one way to help us out and give your feedback at the same time is to leave a review on our demo.