There has been major changes to Child Arms behind the scenes. While me and the team are getting ready to work on the next character Mayana, we also been busy rebranding ourselves and updating our online presence. I'm currently renovating all our social sites and making plans on how to give Child Arms exposure to get a player base going. A lot of our sites have been neglected for some time and that was giving the impression that we are not active when nothing could be further from the truth. It's just that I, the creator of the game and the programmer, am in charge of everything related to Child Arms as the only others in the team are an art studio and a music composer. Everything else is on me, including promotion, and am currently rectifying that by making a plan on how to keep everything updated.

At this time, I am not actually ready to actually put anything into motion but eventually realized that the last demo had an error that kept you from starting the game. If you didn't have a prior save file, the game would not proceed to the start screen due to an oversight in the code for checking controllers. It never occurred to me that this version was in the last version of the demo which was uploaded over 2 months! Now that we've manage to make a few changes to the itch.io page, we've been getting some traffic our way and it was imperative that I upload a build that fixes that bug. The latest version, 0.3.1.2, can now run without any problems for first timers. If you already downloaded the game before 0.3.1.0, you probably never noticed it to begin with but this new version also comes with many new additions to it that it is worth downloading.

Enro stat changes

• Enro's special Turnaround Slash now only takes 60 stamina instead of 100.
• If you used his shield and the opponent attacked you, it would add 300 stamina to the combo cost, meaning that if you attacked after pulling out your shield, you would pay extra stamina. This was the reason why it felt like he didn't had much stamina to begin with. This has been removed and now you may attack after using his shield without paying a huge price in stamina.
• Another culprit that kept eating away at his stamina was the combo cost. This has been reduced from 25 to 20 and his stamina recovery timing has been increased by 1. This means that Enro's attacks will take less stamina and recuperate slightly faster than before.

Neutral Discipline

The biggest change in this version would be the addition of Neutral Discipline, something I wanted to do for a long while. This isn't really a discipline per-say, it's more like the default unaltered stats that was used for Instinct. In a way, Instinct was mean to be the neutral state but it never occurred to me to make the stats available without the automatics.

Because Neutral is just Instinct without the automatics, they share the same slot, meaning that you have to turn off Instinct in order to use Neutral. You can do this on the options menu.

Minor changes

•  For Training mode, there is now a shortcut to reset all the stats on the screen by pressing F9 and then Enter. You can also activate this through the start menu under the Pause Programming option.

• Sidestep no longer just takes 300 stamina away. Instead, you now start accruing 12 cost per shift in position. That means that if you sidestep for the first time, there is no cost of stamina but next time, you'll pay 12 stamina, theb you pay 24, and then 36, etc. The cap to this is around the same as the original. This feature is added to keep players from misusing the sidestep but I felt that 300 cost at the beginning was too much. This method will keep the sidestep a viable defense tool and encourage the player to use it sparingly.
• You can now use spaces when naming a custom color palette. This may not be a big deal but the original reason why you couldn't is because it was easier to just not allow spaces in the first place. This has to do with the way naming a color palette is done in-game, which is omitting anything but letters and numbers. I do not want to allow the use of symbols due to the way the game saves the palettes as a file so I wanted to avert compatibility issues as much as I could. However, space is one of the symbols that is allowed to be used to name files, I was just believing that it may not since I come from a time when you couldn't name a file with a space (this was like 10-15 years ago when you had to use underscore in place of a space). But now I have finally gotten accustomed to using space to name files so I decided to re-code the naming function. Now all color files can have spaces in their names.

I am still preparing every one of my social sites but I figured itch.io was more or less done, and it was important to update the game, so I decided to give you guys a heads up on all this.  Hopefully all these changes will be beneficial in getting a player base for Child Arms.