{"id":722,"date":"2026-07-03T17:06:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-03T22:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dphrygian.com\/wordpress\/?p=722"},"modified":"2026-07-03T17:06:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-03T22:06:08","slug":"devs-journal-3-jul-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dphrygian.com\/wordpress\/?p=722","title":{"rendered":"Dev&#8217;s Journal &#8211; 3 Jul 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em>Eldritch 2<\/em>\u00a0is coming to Steam! Please wishlist it\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/store.steampowered.com\/app\/2279280\/Eldritch_2\/\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Today I finally tackled the Anxiety system. I <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dphrygian.com\/wordpress\/?p=287\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/www.dphrygian.com\/wordpress\/?p=287\">wrote<\/a> about it two years ago, and the basic concept has existed in the game for a long time, but it hadn&#8217;t actually <em>done<\/em> anything yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m keeping it pretty simple. Anxiety is a gameplay resource which the player needs to manage. It increases whenever the player takes damage or does certain stressful actions. When the player&#8217;s Anxiety reaches a threshold, NPCs who would normally be neutral will now aggro on sight. Anxiety can be reduced by smoking cigarettes, at the expense of health. (Incidentally, I had to update the content survey on Steam because of the inclusion of tobacco, pushing the game to a 12+ rating in Brazil. Oh well!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Later, when I build out the &#8220;main quest&#8221; for the game&#8217;s &#8220;true ending&#8221;, I intend to add another stricter Anxiety threshold check, requiring the player to not only complete all the required main quest goals, but do it expertly, without accumulating Anxiety.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Since I was already working on this, I also decided to finally add all the food items that interact with the same Health\/Anxiety space: meat and fruit (+1 HP), rotten meat and toxic fruit (random chance of +\/-1 HP), and coffee (+1 HP and +1 Anxiety). I haven&#8217;t done any of the art or audio for those items yet, but the dungeons and shops are now populated with a lot more items, and <em>Eldritch 2<\/em> is feeling closer and closer to the target experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Eldritch 2\u00a0is coming to Steam! Please wishlist it\u00a0here. Today I finally tackled the Anxiety system. I wrote about it two years ago, and the basic concept has existed in the game for a long time, but it hadn&#8217;t actually done anything yet. I&#8217;m keeping it pretty simple. Anxiety is a gameplay resource which the player [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-eldritch-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dphrygian.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dphrygian.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dphrygian.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dphrygian.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dphrygian.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=722"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.dphrygian.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":723,"href":"https:\/\/www.dphrygian.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722\/revisions\/723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dphrygian.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dphrygian.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dphrygian.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}