(Happy Friday the 13th of October, btw. I will be celebrating today by watching Bram Stoker’s Dracula by Francis Ford Coppola if anyone would like to join me in honoring the occasion.)

Last week I made very little progress.

THIS WEEK I MADE A LOT OF PROGRESS.

The major thing I did this week was add a lot to the combat for the game. For this round of battles, Jonathan needs to delete files off of the computers in the chapel so the DJ can set up his equipment. As such, I added a trio of battles in which Jonathan uses a new Destroy skill to destroy the objects. This skill can be acquired from the bookshelf in the office and allows Jonathan to destroy destroyable objects within one tile of him. I also added a second level to the Decoy function that allows the player to manually place the decoy instead of allowing it to randomly spawn.

In order to make the new battles more engaging, I also created a new Gargoyle enemy. The gargoyles will sit stationary until the player comes with the attack range of the gargoyle. When that happens, the gargoyle will “stalk” the player for two turns before pouncing on them. These enemies are much more interesting than the bats and I think create a much more strategic kind of battle.

I also added a lot of quality-of-life updates to the battles, including a battle log, longer time between turns, progress bars on the files, and better selection options for the player. These all make the combat wildly more playable than before and I think the combat is actually, like, fun now.

The other major thing I added was the work scenes for the next week of BYTE. In this, Jonathan finds a property in Manhattan that he believes is a suitable property for the Count and attempts to inquire about the possibility of purchasing it. It does not, we’ll say, go well for Jonathan, though he learns valuable lessons about business and proper decorum in the process.

This was an extremely productive week in BYTE and I feel very well-equipped to head into the final two weeks of this section, which will feature the introduction of many new characters and hopefully get to the first truly major plot event in the story of Dracula.