Mechanics

Pigment

Pigment is used to cast abilities and are generated in different ways. All Enemies and Companions have a health color, and upon taking damage will generate pigment based on that color. Abilities can also be cast with the "incorrect" color of pigment, but will damage the caster in the process.

Pigment colors DO NOT effect the ability itself unless used by a Companion with a certain Passive, such as Delicate.

Pigment	Description
	At the start of each turn, the Pigment Generator above the Pigment Bar will create 3 yellow pigment. Any leftover generated pigment will be lost on the next turn. Generated yellow pigment can persist between turns by dragging it from the generator into the pigment bar. Generated pigment is independent of the pigment bar, and therefore does not make progress towards overflowing. Yellow pigment in the pigment bar will always take priority over the generator for casting abilities unless changed manually.
	Red Pigment is a common pigment generated almost exclusively from red-health enemies and party members.
	Blue Pigment is obtained from blue-health enemies, or it may be generated from Lucky Blue Pigment.
	Purple Pigment is an uncommon pigment generated almost exclusively from purple-health enemies and party members.

Grey Health Bars

Some creatures do not give pigment upon taking damage. This is shown by a grey health bar.

Overflow

If more than 10 pigments are held at once in the pigment bar, the player will start overflowing. On turn end, leftover pigment will be discarded and each party member will take damage increasing with each leftover pigment.

Lucky Blue Pigment

Upon any party member performing an action, there is a base 40% chance that a blue pigment will be generated. This chance and the pigment color are affected by some items, they allow you to cycle between multiple lucky pigment colors depending on what item you have. If the pigment bar is full, the chance will be reduced to 0% regardless.

Split Pigment

Some abilities (such as Digestion on Pearl) have 2-color pigment. This just means that either of those colors can be used and count as correct.

Tips

• Overflow can be avoided by "wasting" pigment. Healing abilities and attacking nothing are some of the ways the player can avoid overflow.

Damage

When the game talks about dealing damage it usually almost always means "Direct" damage, direct damage will trigger the target to produce pigment upon receiving direct damage. However, in some cases (like overflow for example) the damage may be "Indirect", Indirect damage will affect the targets health but will not cause pigment to be produced.

Unless specified otherwise always assume damage is direct.

Icon		Name	Amount
		Almost None/ A Little	1-2
		Painful	3-6
		Agonizing	7-10
		Deadly	11-15
		Lethal	16-20
		Mortal	21+
		Instant Kill	Can either be really high damage like 1945 or 999, or a specific attack that will instantly kill no matter what, like from Heaven or Osman.

Possible Actions

Besides for Damage the game also has a variety of other moves enemies and party members can use. They use intent icons to quickly relay information to the player during a turn, and can be seen below.

Whenever applying any status effects, the status effect icon is used as the intent icon.

Icon	Meaning	Misc
	Slightly Heals	For Heals between 1-4
	Heals	For Heals between 5-10
	Greatly Heals	For Heals between 11-20
	Miraculously Heals/Fully Heal	For Heals 21+, or Full heals
	Consume Pigment
	Produce Pigment	Also used to signify randomizing pigment.
	Spawn
	Maximum Health reduction
	Move Right	Being moved, or moving something to the Right.
	Move Left	Being moved, or moving something to the Left.
	Move Left or Right	Being moved, or moving something to the Left or Right (chosen randomly). If up against the edge of the Arena will always go to the opposite side of the edge.
	Randomly Move	Used to signify randomly shuffling a group.
	Miscellaneous	Used by a wide variety of effects that are specific or unique enough, so don't have another icon to use.
	Unknown	Used in the timeline if the enemy has Confusion or Obscured
	Transform	Only used by Music men and Conductors when they are about to Transform.
	Ressurection	Used when resurrecting someone. Currently only used by Agon.
	Stand	Only used by Revolas when they are about to Stand.
	Sit	Only used by Revolas when they are about to Sit.
	Great Equalizer	Only used by Ungod's "Great Equalizer" ability.
	Refresh	Used by moves that refresh abilities or movement, however sometimes they instead use the miscellaneous icon, it is inconsistent.

Enemy size

Most enemies take up the standard amount of space, just one. However there exists some enemies who take up two, or even three spaces. This works as one would except it would, the enemies usually have more health and are able to target more spaces, but they are more easily hit, with attacks that damage multiple spaces being able to hit them multiple times.

Coins

Coins act as the Game's currency, there are multiple ways to gain them, though most of the time it's usually as a reward from combat encounters, or from opening gray chests in the overworld.

Coins can either be spent on buying items from the shop, buying party members from the fools board, or on leveling up party members.

Party members can only be leveled up once per area before hitting the cap, the amount of money needed to level up is increased by 5 each time, starting at 10.

The money gained from combat encounters is based on the encounter itself, rather than the enemies, I.E if more enemies spawn during an encounter, then more coins would not be gained. (With rare exceptions such as the Unfinished Heir)

These are all the possible coin rewards for each encounter in an area

	Far Shore	Orpheum	Garden
Easy Encounter	2-4 Coins	3-5 Coins	5-7 Coins
Medium Encounter	4-6 Coins	5-7 Coins	7-9 Coins
Hard Encounter	5-9 Coins	6-10 Coins	8-12 Coins
Boss Encounter	10-15 Coins	12-17 Coins	N/A

Stressful Orchestra (Real-time Game Mode)

A mode for Brutal Orchestra that turns the game real-time. The timeline will move through actions at a set pace, with the player taking actions anytime an enemy isn't, and what was originally the player's turn is now a refresh. Speed controls are available above the timeline, including 1x, 2x, and 3x speed, as well as an 'auto skip' button that will skip the downtime between enemy attacks.

To access this mode:

• Right click on Brutal Orchestra in the Steam Library
• Select "Properties"
• Select "Betas"
• Under "Private Betas" type in "ballwizardslives

This mode uses a separate save file as the base game.

Changelog

• TBA - Future Updates (all known future updates not connected to 1.4)
• TBA - Brutal Orchestra 1.4 "Lore Update" (not official name)
• 27 September, 2023 - Brutal Orchestra 1.3.4 "Bienvenidos al Infierno"
• 2 June, 2023 - Brutal Orchestra 1.3.3 "Loud and Clear!"
• 17 December, 2022 - Brutal Orchestra 1.3.2 "Anniversary Update"
• 25 October 2022 Brutal Orchestra 1.3.1 Minor Fixes.
• 23 October 2022 Brutal Orchestra 1.3 "Exquisite Corpse"
• 13 May 2022 - Brutal Orchestra 1.2.1 "Poached Eggs"
• 2 May 2022 - Brutal Orchestra 1.2 "Egg of Incubus"
• 5 February 2022 - Brutal Orchestra 1.03 "Show Stopper."
• 7 January 2022 - Brutal Orchestra 1.02 "Who's Laughing Now?"
• 24 December 2021 - Brutal Orchestra 1.01 "Walk and Talk."
• 17 December, 2021 - Brutal Orchestra 1.0. "Launch Version"

Trivia

• Before Brutal Orchestra's release different colours of pigment were originally identical save for their differing colours. This was changed after one particular playtester had an excruciating time playing the game and ultimately discovered they were colourblind.
• Throughout most of Brutal Orchestra's development "Pigment" was known as "Mana", this was changed due to many playtesters making a lot of assumptions about how Pigment functioned based off of how Mana worked in other games. The most common misconception being that the individual colours of Pigment were imbued with unique powers and using certain colours would alter the effects of abilities.
• Green and Grey pigment have sprites in the files, but were made mostly for testing purposes
• In the code of the game Final Boss encounters actually give out 15-20 Coins as a reward upon their defeat, this of course never matters due to the fact that the game immediately ends.