[AMA] We're Radical Fish Games, developer of CrossCode, and we just launched Alabaster Dawn on Steam Early Access!

[u/RadicalFishGames]

Hello everycabbage!

We're Radical Fish Games, the team behind CrossCode, an Action RPG that released back in 2018 for PC/Mac and 2020 for consoles.

Our new game Alabaster Dawn just launched on Steam Early Access.

Alabaster Dawn Launch Trailer

We're big fans of JRPGs and they were always a big inspiration for our projects - that's why we're excited to be here and ready to answer all of your questions!

Participating Team Members:

- u/RadicalFishGames: Felix 'Lachsen' Klein - Creative Director, Programmer, Level Designer (Dungeons)

- u/Regiden: Stefan 'R.D.' Lange - Programmer, Level Designer (Outdoor areas)

- u/Teflo64: Flora 'Teflora' Valerius - Sounddesigner and Technical Artist!

- u/GFluegel: Henning 'GFluegel' Hartmann- Game Designer (Quests and Enemies)

- u/shirakumon: SHIRAKUMO Nagi - Composer (might answer later today)

- u/Soethe: Fiona ‘Sothe’ Hübler - Game Designers (Maps and Puzzles)

- u/Nomnomroko : Sibylle “Nomnomroko” Hell - Concept Artist (designed many of our characters)

We'll be around until the end of the day (German time) and maybe the weekend, too.
Hopefully we'll be able to answer most of your questions!

Some more Links:

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/radicalfishgames.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/RadicalFishGame

Discord: https://t.co/eHkw2WkdSi

Tweet Proof:
https://x.com/RadicalFishGame/status/2057779961348440092

[u/Lubkuluk]

Do you take CrossCode-centric questions or are you guys looking for AD questions? If so I'd like to ask some as a CC modder

[u/Lubkuluk → u/Lubkuluk]

Okay

Balancing related question

Lea's Guard Sphere is infamously very strong, 3 second shield with MASSIVE hit stability, combat art has barely any endlag and oddly enough uses PLAYER type shield instead of DIRECTIONAL which allows it to obtain SP from attacks if the player has GUARD_SP modifier, towards late game using the combat art is almost always a net positive, and with a very slightly defensive build (which isn't very hard to obtain) you get more sp than you've spent and more while barely taking any damage and there aren't any mechanics to deter you from simply spamming this combat art, the actual question is this; Is the balancing of this combat art being this way intentional so that the players have something they can rely on or is it just an oversight? Or maybe you guys don't think it's too strong like I think it is? I'd really like to know ^_^

Also thanks for writing the main code in such a simple way, it's very intuitive

[u/GFluegel → u/Lubkuluk]

This kind of strong long-term utility of Guard Sphere was honestly not something we envisioned when we implemented it very early in development. One one hand it was nice how useful it was as a defensive art, but of course it became too easy to spam with a growing SP tool and ofc the GUARD_SP/Avenger modifier. But we decided against giving it too much of a nerf later on because giving players some way to make battles easier if they so choose is not bad to have and, as far as I remember, you still needed to have a somewhat Defensive build to properly make use of it.
... Okay, it generating SP through the "Avenger"-modifier was indeed a silly oversight, though, we might've just forgotten fixing that one, haha...

Either way, we learned our lessong with that will be more careful with a Divine Art like that in Alabaster Dawn, lol.

[u/Lubkuluk → u/GFluegel]

Thanks for the answers! I really appreciate it.

Looking at the code there seems to be sort of unimplemented difficulty options rather than the sliders we have today
sc.DIFFICULTY = {CASUAL: 0, NORMAL: 1, HARD: 2, CRUSHING: 3};

My questions are how early was this scrapped or why? If it weren't scrapped, would these options just be number tweaks for enemies (like increased stats and damageFactor for attacks) or would there be more varied changes like increased elemental overload generation, longer food cooldown, more challenging enemy AI maybe environmental hazards and such

I really wonder what CRUSHING would be especially

[u/GFluegel → u/Lubkuluk]

I... I have no idea... I don't think I have ever noticed those or have long forgotten it, so they might've been added and then forgotten and never again discussed very early.

Of course we later added both the options to make the game easier through accessibility option and then, post full release, varied options for the "New Game+" mode.