New Website! Discontinuing this blog.

It's been longer than usual since I have made an update. I have been very busy with fixing, changing, and adding all sorts of things to Aleph, and I also have been building a website which will ultimately serve as a platform for Aleph and any other projects I ultimately tackle. Please check out the site here and bookmark it:

www.pioneervalleygames.com

It is still being worked on, but for the most part I am pretty happy with it. There are a ton of new screenshots for Aleph in the Screenshot section, so be sure to check them out! Also, in the Forum you will find the latest updates for Aleph. Right now that would be the Changelog for the upcoming 1.1.0 Beta (it is a rather lengthy Changelog!)

Further, the website now hosts my own personal blog, so I am going to discontinue updates on this blog. You can find much more frequent and up-to-date information on the website from here on out.

So, if you would be so kind, head on over!

www.pioneervalleygames.com

It Has Begun!

Last week, the earliest Beta version of the game was released to a small group of testers, and so far there has been a lot of great suggestions and feedback and a small number of bugs found to squash. I have a nice, lengthy Changelog which is accumulating more items each day, which is satisfying to me.
There haven't been many bad issues, and only a couple of relatively minor graphical issues. One of the troubles, naturally, was early game balance and players being eaten to death by cows and wolves, so I made changes in that department. I am making a brand new Intro/tutorial sequence that I hope is engaging and interesting as well as informative. I just recently finished creating the big bad guy for the game, and I am pretty pleased with how he came out both art-wise and mechanic-wise.

I am working to fix what bugs I can and continue to add more content into the game, while my Coder-At-Arms fixes the more insidious bugs and diligently upgrades the existing code (he already removed the load-times even on crappy systems like my ancient laptop between maps). I am going to release 1.1.0 to the same group of folk testing the 1.0.0 version, and then I am going to focus on bigger additions to the game after, and then start including more testers. I set up a small, off-site forum for testers to post their suggestions, bugs, and balance issues, and I am pleased with how its working so far.

I am also in the process of setting up an official website, ultimately where the finished product will be purchasable to non-backers, and contain all sorts of information and other goodies. I will be sure to inform everyone when the site is ready.

This update will be a short one because I have a lot of work ahead of me and I want to get to it! Have a great weekend everyone!

Upcoming Beta Testing

I've been contacting people, as outlined in previous updates, for the first, initial testing phase. I've met the minimum number of people I wanted, and there are still a few people I have not heard from yet, but I'm giving about a week for people to get back in touch with me before distributing test copies.

The previously mentioned game-crashes are fixed. An optimization was made to pretty much remove all loading time between map transfers, but it has some quirks of its own so I will not be including it in the first round of testing (which means people will need to get used to the 3-4 second wait times between maps for testing purposes).

I went through the game and made sure that all areas are accessible for testers (at least I hope...), and also filled all of the towns with simple NPC templates. This means players can purchase and craft everyhing they need, but these NPCs will be replaced over time with their 'real' counterparts that will have actual dialogue, names, and so forth instead of just the template setup I created.

I implemented all of Mr. Rao's music into the game finally, and added various background-sounds as appropriate and, I must say, what a HUGE difference this makes in terms of game quality. All this time I've been running tests without the music and sounds implemented because it saved time and disk space, but my god, does the music and sound add so much to the game experience as a whole. I love it. I also added all of the battle backgrounds to all of the appropriate maps, and threw in a handful of the special weapons and pieces of armor. I am going to continue to add more content into the game for the remainder of this week, and then distribute the test copy to the appropriate people for testing next week.

The primary focus of this first round of testing is combat and exploration. I want to make sure that players can access all necessary areas, and that combat is smooth and interesting, and discover whatever fundamental bugs that might be lurking about. As such, testers will have more immediate access to most skills and spells than normal. I am hoping players will also play around with crafting, decorating, and so forth as well. There are a number of elements that have not yet been implemented for this first round of tests, namely quests, dungeon/town takeovers, books, important NPCs (except party members, which exist now), mercenaries, bosses (though I might throw in one for the hell of it) and some various minor elements.

I have a feeling this initial testing phase will be rough due to the lack of in-game hints, tips, and directions, as well as monsters that may very well be too tough for certain locations, lack of unique weapons and armor, and just the fact that I 'eyeballed' most of the numbers in the game. But I do appreciate those who are interested in testing - the feedback I ancticipate will be invaluable for improving and balancing the game. I can't wait, personally!

Once I gather all pertenent information, suggestions, etc from this first round of testing, I am going to take some time to implement and change things as necessary, and continue to keep adding/changing NPCs, weapons, armor, whatever else that needs changing and adding. Then I will open this up for the second round of testing, which will include a larger body of testers, who I shall contact in due time, and I will repeat the whole process until it is time for the third phase of testing (hopefully the largest part of the entire game being complete at that point) in which every elligible beta tester can participate and give feedback/suggestions.

On a side note, I have not been able to do as much work as usual this past week. I recieved a rather severe bite on the hand (gotta love working in a hospital) which pretty much made it very difficult to do any work for about 3 days until the punctures and bruising diminished. It's healing up quite nicely now and I can use that hand once more for typing/mouse control, so I am delving back into game-making.

Anyways, I hope you all have a great week/weekend!

-Jesse

Closer... Closer...

This past week has been not very productive in comparison to, say, the week before and the week before that. I've only been able to put in maybe 2-3 hours a day tops for the most part throughout this week due to a rather large influx of work at my, well, place of work. It is not common to be this busy. For those of you who don't recall, I am a Security Officer for a hospital. This means I administer medicinal smack-downs as appropriate, so when there is an influx of work, that means things are not going oh-so-well. But hopefully things will calm down after this weekend and I can start putting in more time again. Also, I will be starting the Beta process pretty soon, probably within the next two weeks or so. More on that further on in the update.

Furniture!
Ah, yes, the wild and wonderful world of home decore. With a vast majority of the characters and monsters taken care of, I've turned to producing furniture and such to fill up the various houses and buildings of Aleph. Most of the furniture can be picked up and put down as you like, with the exceptions of larger pieces, such as tables, beds, armoirs, and large benches. These are static objects. All of the smaller items, however, are re-arrangable. This also has an unintended side-effect that I didn't think through originally: you could theoretically fence off areas with chairs or end-tables or whatever and monsters won't be able to pass through and get you. Anyways, here is a 'before' picture:

Pretty spartan. This is one of the rooms in the player-housing area where all of your allies and such not in your party will ultimately hang out. The benches and tables are static. I felt the room looked a bit too sparse, so I went out, chopped some wood, and crafted some furniture. Then I cheated and made myself some paintings and such (you can get them in game regardless):

Now that looks nicer, homelier. Some items serve dual functions, like the clocks which will give you the time of day/night. I still need to work on some of the art and refine it more, but I like how it's shaping up. Being able to customize in-game space always appealed to me greatly in games, which is probably why I loved Ultima 7.

The Aleph

I've spoken awhile back about the general function of the Aleph, to help you locate items, people, whatever throughout the game. I wanted to give a more specific look at how it tends to function once its full ability is unlocked. When talking to NPCs, you will get an occasional mention of a special, magical weapon, armor, or object that will be in a slightly different color:

Any object mentioned that is in that yellow-ish color means that you can use the Aleph to find that particular object. When reading books, you will come across plenty of useable words as well. So, for example, let's say that the sound of the Eye Gouger sword is intriguing and you want to go and find it. So you whip out your trusty Aleph, type in Eye Gouger, and viola:

The Aleph shows you the location of the object. L-16 refers to the grid position. You will have a map that you can look at, which divides the world into a large grid, A-R right to left, 1-22 top to bottom. When you look at the map, you can find L-16 and see what part of the world that is. If the object is in a dungeon, like the Eye Gouger is, the Aleph will tell you the name of that dungeon, and the level it is on. The 023,047 refer to the exact coordinates of the object in the dungeon or in that specific section of the world grid. In this case, the Eye Gouger is 23 tiles to the right, and 47 tiles down from the upper left most corner. You can use the Aleph to find your own position, so you can tell if you're getting closer or further away.

You can type position, or location into the Aleph and it will give you your grid location, as explained above, and your precise x/y coordinate, so you can use this information to close in on a particular object that you want.

Beta
I haven't gotten as much done this past week or so as I would have liked (as stated above). I wanted to have at least 2 or 3 towns full of NPCs, but I only have 1. So what I will probably end up doing is just adding the essential NPCs (shops and such) in time for the first round of Beta. This will make some of the towns rather empty, but that is not important for the first round of testing. I also have a couple of crash bugs that have not yet been resolved that need to be resolved before I begin testing.

I stated awhile back how I planned to breakup the Beta testing phases: 

"The first phase will naturally be the roughest since the game will still fairly be in its infancy. Thusly I would only want 3-5 testers during this phase. The second phase will be more polished and more of a complete experience, and open to an additional 5-10 testers. The third stage will feature the game mostly how it is supposed to be, but for the purpose of squashing any lingering bugs and balancing game-play mechanics, it will be open to all beta testers. It seems dubious to me that anyone would want to test out the same game up to 3 times before playing the finished, polished version, so anyone who wants to participate in Beta at one point or another does not have to participate in all phases, though they can if they choose and are eligible.

Eligibility for Beta testing will be determined by reward tier – it seems the fairest, easiest way to do it. So for the first phase which will need 3-5 people, I will start at top of the reward list for highest backers and offer an invitation. If they accept, then they are in, if they decline (or perhaps want to participate in a later phase or not at all) then the invitation goes to the next highest backer. The second phase will follow the same rules, just with additional open slots for testing."

So in a couple of weeks I will start contacting the appropriate people until I have 3-5 people. The main focus of this first round of Beta will be exploration and combat for the most part. Things like quests, the Aleph system, the dungeon/town raids will not be fully implemented yet. The particular goal this time around is mostly to make sure the foundation elements of the game work correctly and identify any particularly heinous bugs or crashes.

So that will be coming up relatively soon.
I hope you all have a great weekend!

Update Time

Good mornin', afternoon, or evenin', depending upon when you're reading this.


It's that time again... Update time! Bam!

Ever since I placed that first round of testing deadline for myself, I have found myself pushing harder to get the game into a state where it is, in fact, testable without crashing. This is both good and bad. Good because it means a lot is happening to bring the game to fruition. Bad because it makes me go insane and chase people around a large, isolated, empty hotel in the midst of winter with an axe until I end up in a hedge maze and freeze. Again. Basically my schedule is like this: I wake up. I work on Aleph for 1-2 hours. I shower. I work on Aleph for 1-2 more hours. I eat. I go to work. At work, depending on how busy I am, I can put in as few as 1 or 2 hours, or as many as 5 or so hours. When I get home after 11pm from work, I put in 1-3 more hours. Then I sleep. Then I wake up and repeat the process. Every. Day. On days off, it is a bit different, putting anywhere up to 12 or so hours in.

Buuut, hopefully the game will be in good enough shape to be tested within a month or so. Some of the bugs mentioned previously have been taken care of. I found the root of the problem for why the ships are incapable of sailing on water and only sail on land. Hopefully that will be fixed by this weekend. I fixed the problem with the game crashing under certain conditions when the player went to certain locations that had particular fog overlays. The monster and resource spawn system has been fixed and works quite well. I found a source of loading lag (when transferring between 'maps' the game was lagging for 2-4 seconds), so now that is identified, I can fix it at some point. A bunch of miscellaneous errors have been corrected. Equipping equipment no longer crashes the game. Dropping weapons or armor onto the ground no longer crashes the game, nor does it drop the wrong items. Dropping items still crashes the game, though, and I hope this will be fixed by this weekend as well. Right now, searching dead bodies crashes the game, but that is not a bug, I just haven't assigned loot tables yet.

So, as far as testing goes, I can live with a few quirks and bugs, but I will not begin testing as long as the game crashes and I know there is an issue with it that can be fixed. I am sure once these issues are fixed and testing begins more crashes and such very well may be discovered, which is the nature of testing, but I still want to try to make the testing phase go as smoothly as possible.

I've been churning out additional art and revamping existing art. I think it's all starting to look pretty good, and reminds me a lot of certain games from the 90's. It is all still a work in progress, but progress is progressing. Or something. Anyways, I made a bunch of furniture, chairs, tables, cabinets, and the like, along with miscellaneous items like wells, catapults, an animated guillotine, Alephs, statues, skeletons, graves, tombs, and so forth. I realized that my primary 'artistic' inclination was to massively desaturate everything of color, sort of following the 'brown is real' trope of modern games. I decided that I liked the more vibrant colors of older games over the browns and greys of todays, so I 're-saturated' most of the graphics to liven up the landscape a bit.

I've started placing the monster spawners in the various maps and dungeons. I would say about half, maybe a little less than half, of the world currently has monsters and random plant resources (for alchemy and crafting) spawning in the appropriate areas. At first, this was a bit problematic because there are some tougher monsters out in the wilds, and I figured it would kind of suck if you just wandered into one of these areas while exploring and get totally eaten alive. So, I placed a level spawner in some locations as well; meaning that those harder monsters won't spawn until the player is level X or above, sort of like Fallout. This way the player will be better equipped to handle such creatures. I did not do this for dungeons, though, and some dungeons are a lot harder than others. I will try to drop hints throughout the game so you can get a sense of which dungeons might be most appropriate at the time (though this will depend more upon your equipment and party makeup than actual attributes and levels).

So, what exactly is an Aleph, anyways?

Since as far back as ancient Persia (or perhaps beyond), the concept of scrying stones has been around. J.R.R. Tolkien referred to them as Palantirs, the church of Latter Day Saints call them Seer Stones, Jorge Luis Borgais called his the Aleph (from which I divined the name for this game), and there are many other names and types thereof. The general purpose, regardless of what they are called and by whom, is pretty similar throughout history and fantasy. They are a medium in which the user divines some sort of truth or psychic vision; they are used to see things, past present or future, over a great or short distance. That is the cliff-notes version.

How does this relate to the game Aleph, though? In the game world I've created, there exists multiple Alephs. Only a Seer, whom is from another realm completely (I.E. you!) has the ability to utilize these ancient magical constructs. As the Seer, you assume control over the House of the Aleph, which has remained dormant for many years. Upon doing so, you receive a small Aleph, which you can use to locate items and people throughout the world (as talked about in a previous update). The larger Alephs, as you see in the picture above, have a different function. Once you master a particular principle (Bravery, Empathy, Wisdom, etc), and you interact with the associated Aleph, it will bestow a certain power upon you. These particular powers generally grant you immunity from a particular ailment or effect. The Aleph of Wisdom, for example, prevents you from becoming confused or possessed by evil spirits. The last, and the most ancient of Alephs, under the right conditions will bring about the end of the game.

Graves!

I gathered up all of the Kickstarter backer names as appropriate and placed them on their respective grave markers and such and placed them throughout the game. I wanted to make sure everyone's name got used (who supplied one) so I went ahead and did that before it slipped my mind.

So, going forward, I hope to finish, or at least be darn near close to finishing, placing all of the monster and resource spawners throughout the entire game. I will continue to work on making the art consistent and editing old art to make it up to date. Once the spawn system is in place, I am going to start adding shop keepers and standard NPCs (right now I only have the party member NPCs in the world, and the Steward of your noble house). I would also like to work on the items a bit more and make sure they are all working as intended in game. I also have to add furniture to the item database so that you can pick it up and place it where you like. I want most furniture to be interactive in this way, except for large furniture like tables, cabinets, and the like.

Do you have some good ideas?

Part of what I love about the whole Kickstarter thing is that I don't feel like I am alone in making this game - that it is, in at least some ways, a collaboration of ideas. So, I would like to reach out to you fine folk and perhaps pick some of your brains, if you would be so willing.

What I would like is some ideas for dungeon traps, puzzles, riddles, and the like. I have a bunch of my own, but it would be irresponsible for me to assume that I have covered the gamut by myself and have created interesting puzzles on my own. I remember seeing one Kickstarter's ideas for a dungeon and they were things I never thought of, and it really made my day seeing those ideas. And that is what I love - people's ideas that are so much different than my own, that I never could think of.

So, if you have a nifty puzzle, dangerous trap, or head-scratchin' riddle you would like to share with me, it might well end up in one of the dungeons of Aleph. For the sake of not spoiling anything, feel free to send any idea to me via private message or e-mail (personal e-mail: llama32@hotmail.com).

Thanks and see you next time!

Update Time: Argle Bargle Bugs! New Trailer! New Logo!

So, like the new logo? I sure do!

I hope everyone is ready for the upcoming weekend and the (hopefully) fun that it brings. I know I am looking forward to a couple days off!

Mr. Rao was gracious enough to make some really, really great trailer music for an otherwise mediocre trailer that I made (I should have taken a film class in college). Please check it out here:

So what has been going on lately?

I've been working steadily on making various visual/graphical improvements; just about all of the party members have been added to the game world (and are thus now recruitable) along with the Steward for your housing area which will help manage your retinue as it grows.

The Shimmering Mirrors are all set up over the world. Depending on how the sun or moon is reflecting off of these mysterious prisms, touching them will take you to different places. These mirrors are a form of fast-travel with limited control. Though, it might be best not to touch them at midnight...

The Mark and Recall spells are all set and working perfectly. I made another spell which is kind of neat, Wizard's Eye, which will transform you into a little glowy ball and zooms you around the area so you can see what's around.
I pretty much finished all of the monster spawn templates, so now it's just a matter of copy and pasting the appropriate spawner into each section of the game. There still needs to be a few tweaks, but nothing major. A change was made to allow for monsters to occupy more 'space' than before. Previously, monsters occupied one tile, regardless of how big their art image was, which made for some odd clipping issues with some of the graphics and environments. However, appropriate monsters will now take up 2x2, 3x3 tiles as necessary. This means you could flee a monster by running through a narrow area that the creature is too big to fit through.

I've just about finished all of the crafting recipes and items. Using the appropriate items/areas will allow you to craft certain things. For example, using a blacksmith's forge allows you to craft metal weapons and armor. Using a wood-working kit allows you to make wooden weapons, armor, items, furniture, etc. Using a Fine kit (a kit used for making small, intricate items typically) will allow you to make rings, necklaces, tools, and various other items. A sewing kit allows you to make cloth armor, bandages, and the like. There are hundreds of craftable items.


Zounds! Bugs!

A good portion of the code was re-worked to make the whole game run smoother and quicker, especially on lower-end machines. For people with good desktops, there won't be much change in performance. But if you have a 5+ year old laptop that was never really good to begin with, like me, it pretty much doubles the FPS. Buuuuuuuuut...

With this changes came a bunch of new bugs and crashes. About half of the crashes have been fixed already, and thanks to Mr. Rao, I found a couple more today that need to be fixed.

See this picture here?

'Tis a lie! A new bug has made it so that ships only sail on land, and not on water. An interesting dynamic, sure, but I much prefer my ships to sail in water, but I just might be conventional. Gonna need to get that fixed, too.

Mr. Rao also pointed out that he was devoured by Dire Wolves outside of the player housing area, something that is not supposed to happen because I specifically wanted only chickens, sheep, and regular (non-dire) wolves to spawn in that area. But luckily that wasn't a bug, it was human error on my part for accidently spawning Dire Wolves instead of regular wolves. Sorry Mr. Rao!

Another peculiar bug involves the item system. Whenever you drop an item, it should, in theory, drop at your feet on the ground wherever you happen to be standing. However, instead of dropping the indicated item, it drops something completely different. So if I want to drop a cloth robe, it instead drops an iron sword. I drop an iron sword, instead it drops a frost leaf. That's gonna need to be sorted out as well.


The Mystery of Map ID099

There is a region in the game called Map ID099, also now simply known as 'The Twilight Zone'. Whenever a portion of the world is created, it is created on a blank 'map' and assigned a map ID, going from 1 to X (whatever the ending number is). So the first map I make is Map ID 001. The second map is Map ID 002. And so forth. I have many hundreds of map IDs. However, for some reason that defies all logic and reason, the game absolutely refuses to acknowledge the existence of Map ID099. The game pretty much wants nothing to do with it, and it pretty much doesn't exist. Only it does, and strange, wonderous things happen there.

Since I can't use Map ID099 for game purposes (since the game refuses to acknowledge its existence), I use it sort of as a building zone for templates (things I can simply copy and paste to other maps instead of making each one from scratch). This is where I began building my monster spawners. When I was testing out the monster spawners on a normal map that the game recognized, the monster spawns were not working properly. There was a bug. The monsters spawned, you could fight them, and when they died they crashed the game entirely. That was no good. So I went back to Map ID099 to examine it to see if it was some error I caused. I didn't change anything because I couldn't find anything wrong with it and when I tested the monster spawn in 099... it worked. I took the spawn and placed it back in the normal map... it didn't work. Map ID099? Worked.

So the same exact monster spawn that failed to work in the game would work in this place that doesn't even exist according to the game... Same coding, same everything... It is a place of magic and wonder, where broken code works but can never be part of the game itself.


Anyways...

Going forward, I am hoping to get all of those bugs squashed soon. I am going to keep updating the visuals and adding more and more NPCs to the world. I need to place the spawners in the world as well and set their appropriate spawn areas.

I am going to close out this updat with a smattering of various screenshots:


This big fellow is Dreghar, one of the Kickstarter backer characters. He is a rather large and powerful man, but there is more to him than meets the eye.

Here are some combat images. Note: The battle message window has since moved from its rather obtrusive position to the top of the screen since I last took these screenshots.

Some houses within a wooden barricade/fort:

Ruins of House Westmark, at the southern edge of the Dead Woods:

The House of Eastmark has obviously fared better than its sister House:



In the desert north of Eastmark:

In the depths of a dungeon located in the Ferocia mountains:



On the Isle of Creeping Vines, at the entrance to the dungeon Simultas:



Wandering through the Blood Wood:



I will see you all next update!

New Year, New Updates

I hope everyone had a great holiday season and New Year. Hopefully you got everything you wanted done last year and made way for the new and exciting things that this year will bring (like the end of the world!)

I received Skyrim on Christmas and I will admit, I did not get as sucked in as I thought I would. There will be a few spoilers ahead, so tread carefully if you have not yet played. I spent Christmas and most of the following day playing it, but after that it sort of went out of my system. I dabbled with it off and on since, getting myself up to level 22 with full legendary dragon plate and such, but I don't find myself as enthralled to it as I was to Fallout 3 (the reason I bought an X-Box 360 originally). The game is entertaining and fun, no doubt about it, and visually impressive. But all that is a veneer for fetch quests and kill 10 bears quests. The music is of fantastic quality, but often inappropriately placed. Having a full orchestra going with choire vocals chiming in, bringing the whole scene to a climactic high is wonderful... but not when I am buying potions. And the really sad, morose town theme when I am fighting a dragon is a bit awkward as well. I am beginning to hate dungeons because they all look -exactly- the same with the exact same textures and for the most part the same draugrs, bandits, and spiders. The single most epic thing that has happened was a mistake when I killed an imperial noble on the road (I hate those guys) and when I went to Whiterun, the guards all started to attack me, but half the town came to my aid and there was a giant fight. I ultimately reloaded it to a point where I did not kill the noble, but still, that was my best moment thus far.

I just want to make mention of something that irks me with modern games. The quest hud. How is it my character magically knows the location to every single mythical and ancient relic just by having someone tell him to go and find it? Granted, in a 3-dimensional world as large as Skyrim's, you need something to orient you, but pretty much all of the mystery and exploration is moot when you have an exact path laid out for you for every. single. quest. objective. It makes it so that I don't pay attention -at all- to the quest story or NPCs and just bounce from one arrow to the next until I finish the quest. Bah, I say. But that's just me.


Anyway, moving on to Aleph!

So I got some new software which I am loving. I am altering the character/monster art for a couple of reasons: 1.) to make characters/monsters stand out more from the background, and 2.) to give characters/monsters a more sort of retro look from the early 90's. I've added a faint black outline to the characters which makes them standout more and give them the sort of retro look, and I replaced their old shadows with simpler ones that come from the game palette itself instead of the software program used to make the characters. The old shadows were multi-colored and purplish and did not really jive. I like the look and feel of the characters now, and I won't need to redo everything, just modify what I have. Plus, now characters/monsters are more consistent art-wise with items and objects, making everything gel together better.

Though, I -did- redo the main characters. Nothing wrong with the old ones, but the new ones look more heroic in my mind:

The female version of the main character still needs a bit of work as far as the isometric directions go (notably the down-right one) but otherwise I think they look pretty spiffy. Here's a few more examples:

I also whipped up a boat which I thought came out pretty nice. I had to make it smaller than 1:1 scale because if I kept it at that ratio it would have been too big to control properly and caused all sorts of issues, so I scaled it down. As of right now, the boat is the only item not 1:1 scale.

The old main characters will be used for another purpose after I modify them. I am also going to be redoing some of the Kickstarter rewards to make them a bit more badass and epic.

I've finished pretty much all of the monster spawners, so once I place them monsters will start popping up as necessary. There's a couple of new monsters I added but need to finish up their art, including some pretty badass bosses. I began working out loot tables for treasure chests and other containers as well, and will be setting up the bank system soon (this allows you to access a certain inventory from any town that has a bank, making it so you dont need to travel back to your housing area for extra gear or storage). I've added the end fight to the game and have been working backwards, so today or tomorrow I will have the full 'main quest' finished and playable. I incorporated a Kickstarter item into this... having said item will give you an extra option at the end of the game, allowing you to choose a different ending.

Mr. Rao made a new and extremely kickass and epic version of the main theme which I will use for the opening main menu. It actually reminds me of Skyrim's in the sense that it makes me want to grab a battle axe and start rocking some dragon faces.

Once I have the main quest all set in place, I am going to add in more NPCs, items, quests, and such and just gradually fill up the big ol' world I spent forever laying out.

If you haven't submitted your Kickstarter reward idea yet (there are only a small handful who haven't) then now would be the time to get it in.

Thank you all and I hope your new year is starting out as nice as mine!