Full Release 1.0

Finally, it's done.  This semester has been a lot more time consuming than I expected, so I'm sorry that I went totally radio-silent over here.  I'd been keeping my Discord up-to-date, but said absolutely nothing here, sorry about that.  

There's a lot I could say about this update, but not as much as I'd hope considering it's been 2...  3 months?  This has been a great project to work on, and I'm proud of the results.  I tried to make it a project I could make in a summer, and I nearly succeeded before school hit and sucked up 90% of my time.  It's been great to see people actually downloading it and see it on search results.  No idea if people are actually playing it, but I imagine some do which has driven me to keep improving it and create something I'm proud to share.

This last update has been very fun to make, with a couple main focuses.  Adding the final level and making the gameplay interesting.  Re-writing the story to actually be coherent.  Updating the UI.  And a bit of bug fixing and minor rebalancing.

The final level's details I leave to you to discover, but I will mention there's a good ending and a bad ending, thanks Saal for suggesting the mechanism for this.  I'll also say that difficulty is...  strange for this map, but I think it's satisfying even if it gets easy at the end.

The story needed a complete re-write mainly because I had just been writing whatever first came to mind throughout, there was a bit of story planned from the start, but it wasn't well done.  I hadn't decided what the currency was, exactly what the towers were, and who the narrator for the scenes and the wave comments was.
Temporal Energy was the obvious option, and I decided to take a page from Fate/GO's book and say they're summoned help that aren't as fully realized as the main cast.  The wave narration was a bit harder, especially when I decided that all of Smol Myth should take part and I had to add a visual effect to show who was talking.  Although it surprisingly didn't take too long to write it all.
The story is inspired by Myth's Bad Ending, essentially a slightly happier ending from what Mazumaro created.  I'm a sucker for a good ending, so I couldn't go that dark.

The main thing I did for the UI was update it to be more colorful, I realized that if I was using colors to indicate who was speaking, if someone's not too familiar with Hololive then the same color scheme applied to the tower buttons could be a good way to help show who's who.  Beyond that, I got rid of the demo debug button, let the player slow time as well with the timescale slider (Because that final levels paths are short, and I needed extra time to react when debugging.) and finally got rid of the placeholder boxes for the life and money energy counter.  Those are actually assets I created, two of...  4 art things I did in this.  (Unless you count environment design)  I tweaked Gura and Inas animations to include tail/ear-flap movement, and I made a heart and an hourglass.  I'm proud of myself.  It does not take much.

In terms of bug fixing... I was very much considering releasing a bugfix update a month ago when I realized I accidentally left all the Volcano paths open from the start, but I thought "Oh, I'm only a week or so away from release anyway."  Let this be a warning, procrastination leads to regrets.  I should have fixed it and shared what was going on.  Beyond that glaring issue, I don't remember any significant bugs. 
For re-balancing, the biggest thing was improving Smol Kiara because she was massively underperforming in the final level.  Considering how equal the two sides were stat-wise, that told me that she was underpowered, so I sped up her attack rate.  I think I also re-balanced energy drops, but it's been months.

The Future

This is the final update for this game.  From here I plan to finish this, my last semester, in just a couple weeks.  Once that's over, however, I should actually have some time.  I have a job lined up once the semester is over, so I have a plan for survival.  I plan to figure out who exactly is interested in continuing Clock Busters, my other big project, and we're going to be deciding what to do with that.  I'm very much considering a kickstarter for it, but we'll see.  I'm not the only one involved with that project.
I'm also currently working on a VR pet simulator game, if the other students want to keep it up at all I'll likely help them with it.  (The first version should be done at the end of the semester, given it's our final project in that class.  And as always, I upload stuff to Itch.)  In which case, I would expect it to be like this, just a side-project for fun and to learn.

And this may not be the very end for this project.  This is certainly the end for this arc of the story, but I left the door open for a sequel/expansion including Council later down the line if the desire's there.  This has been really fun, and it's been good to interact with the community, not just as a lurker.  (Or, well, actually I never advertised it or talked about it in public spaces...  Am I a lurker game developer?  Man it would be nice to get someone to help advertise...)

No matter what happens, you can follow me in a few places.  I'm trying to use twitter a little, it scares me though so don't expect much from me there.  https://twitter.com/JimladXLII
And you can join my Discord server, https://discord.gg/ZkXMZRP3w6 where I do interact a fair bit and try and regularly update on my games.