I've received a few questions both in email form and from the contact page here asking about why I designed things in certain ways and about "missing" or upcoming content so I figured I'd drop a collection of those answers here for anyone to take a look at.
As a side note, if you use the contact page on this site please make sure there's a working email included as if you want a reply I'm going to email you using whatever email you included.
Why do status effects fall off after battle? Other RPG's leave things like poison or burning on the character they were applied to until you either clear them manually or their timers run out.
That's a tax on players that I found annoying over the years playing different games. The "tax" is in the form of either a cluttered inventory full of various status removal items, making finding other items you're actually looking for even more tedious, or constantly having to use a status clearing skill out of battle on top of needing to constantly use healing abilities. While I will have a player do some tedious busy work, there's a limit to how much I'm going to force you to do just to engage with the battle system.
Why the choices between Venesh and Sarrina as well as Helscen's forms?
Both to serve as a way to give some replay potential to the game as well as to give me room to tell various other stories. In the case of the crypt choice, that was a change made very early on as originally you would get Venesh in the crypt, Sarrina would chase you until you finally reach Eldracil, and then she would join the party after the confrontation with Ashendal. That obviously changed very early on in development as it meant being able to tell various angles to the story in a less cluttered way than it would have ordinarily been. (Act 2 was much more bogged down with things during my initial story outline for the game before I made that change) There was also an issue with the planned skills for Venesh, which broke certain things as well as left awkward issues with the battle screen if you didn't have her in your party which would have led to a lot of confusion. With the way the game is currently setup I can tell various aspects for the story in certain ways as well as leaving things open for the various additional content drops I have planned for the game.
Why do we only get one of each of the crafting items?
Mostly because I never implemented one of the areas in the game that would have let you get more than one of them. That area is going to be included in a small content drop that isn't one of the planned drops for the "weaker" crafting items along with another area for the more "powerful" crafting items that also fills out a bit more of the story of the Endless Sands. I didn't originally plan to do more than just finish up the area and push it out with one of the bug fixes but there are other holes that need to be patched up in the core gameplay so this gives me an opportunity to do that at the same time.
If this is a game based on Golden Sun, where's the Djinn system?
That's coming in one of the later content drops. I'm still trying to see if I can get a "summon" type of skill working properly that doesn't completely break certain things in the combat engine like it does now. Some of the issues, like combat occasionally locking up for no discernible reason, are things that happen a lot more often with the testing "summon" skills because of how I'm having to make the summons work, so I'm trying to avoid even more of that than this engine already suffers from. If I can't get it working properly the system will be limited to just an additional skill for equipping the item onto a party member. It's not ideal but I've already had to make plenty of compromises already so I'm just expecting one more at this point.
How many more companions are planned?
Three. One will be coming with each of the planned content drops, but not the mini content drop I mentioned above. One is a support character that functions differently than the ones already in game, one is a tank that has a different style of damage mitigation than Claude and Helscen's tank form, and one is a blend of damage and status application that is a bit of an odd case in that he can be both brokenly powerful or utterly useless depending on the fight.