Hello Battlebonders and happy new year!

- Most important thing first

Despite the silence, the game is still being worked on!

There have been a lot of ideas we’ve been working through on how to improve from the jam version of the game, but we are all working on this in our collective spare time, so we thought it would be a good idea to let everyone know we’re still here, just working at a steady pace.

That said, we can still share more details about what we’ve been doing over the past few months:

- New leader, new heroes, new looks

Eliselle and NightingaleTide have been hard at work designing a new leader, Lilith, and new heroes, such as the Latex Commando and Shiva the Thief!

Heroes are unique units that are just below army leaders in strength. They may have powerful skills or abilities, and can interact with the leaders in some story segments, but they won’t lead an army in the story.

Additionally, the two leaders you’re already familiar with, Kira and Valerie, have also been given a fresh look! You can see all of the characters mentioned here at the bottom of the devlog.

- Revamped, more focused game mechanics

We received consistent feedback that the bondage wasn’t important enough to deciding the outcome of a battle, so for starters, HP has been removed from the game entirely. Enemy units are now defeated by adding bondage until they surrender (and when this happens depends on the unit’s personality – don’t expect a leader or a brat corrector to give up so easily!).

The effects of bindings have also been tweaked to make their impact felt a bit more. Certain leaders and heroes will also have their own unique bindings to apply.

We’ve been keeping information overload in mind throughout the redesign, with the goal of keeping the flow of information more streamlined than the game jam version despite the additional depth.

- More ways to play

We’re currently planning on having three game modes:

1. Arcade - this would be quite similar to the existing version of the game - pick a map and play!
2. Campaign - follow the story as either Kira or Valerie, fighting your way through be a series of increasingly more challenging battles with an evolving army of characters. Battle-tested units can gain new skills or improve existing ones for an edge in future battles!
3. Mercenaries - carefully draft your army, accept lucrative contracts, and build your reputation, but be careful - with great power comes envious rival corps!

- Future updates

Going forward we’d like to start sharing monthly devlogs, with each one going into a deeper dive about specific parts of the game.

For the first devlog (ETA: 1st week of February), we’ve set up a poll to let you help decide what the topic will be! This will also let us know what people are most interested to see going forward.

https://strawpoll.com/Dwyo3VMkoyA

- Pictures! 👀

Concept art for Lilith, the power-crazed third leader:

The Latex Commando, who claims to be from the future:

Shiva the Thief, who is very trustworthy and totally not hiding anything:

Kira and Valerie, returning for more tactical bondage action: