I feel like I’ve been posting a lot lately, but it’s the end of the month and that means another news update. What happened in February? Well a lot, and also not a lot, at least in terms of what I expected to do.

Most obviously, patch, 0.4.6 went live and two hotfixes followed this month, although 0.4.6.1 had enough bug fixes to basically be its own patch. These patches comprised most of the recent work on the game. Of course there is still a lot more to do as usual. Each hotfix gets the game a little closer to stable. I think these past few patches have gone a long way towards achieving that.

What I’d love is to get back to actual content for the game. If you find a bug please report it, I obviously want to fix them and they should take priority in most cases. I suppose I just miss the days of non-stop content creation. On that note, after having talked about it for what feels like months I made concrete steps towards implementing the compendium in the past few days. For those unaware, the compendium is slated to be a sort of in-game wiki. It probably won’t tell you every little secret, but it will hold a lot of information about the game for easy access. This includes things like available quests, data on items you find, tutorials, completed quests, character bios, and challenges, which if you are playing on Steam will double as achievements. As I recall I’m sitting at around 90 (I think) challenges right now, and there will be more added when new systems enter the mix.

I’m excited about this just because I like filling things out in games and this will basically be that. It will also double as a resource to answer many questions that people have when playing. All in all, it should be a useful addition to the game.

Aside from that I have other plans, because of course I do. Combat is still being worked on although it is very much in its infancy at the moment. A lot of the work being done is just getting sprite work commissioned for everything as there is a ton of it. Sprites are also larger with more animations than what the rest of the game has so it’s more of an endeavor. As for programming, I have things laid out but it’s been sidelined for the moment to work on some “smaller” systems, looking at you compendium.

I would also like to go back through a lot of zones and update them a bit visually. I’m looking to get some assets that I can hopefully use to spruce some areas up a bit as I think some of them are lacking. I’m also eyeing the plains area to the left of the house as something to rework, it’s too large, although its real issue is there is little to nothing in the largeness. It may get overhauled in the near future, but we’ll see.

Another thing I’ve been contemplating is doing a sweep over NPCs in the game. This is theoretical at the moment so don’t hold me to it I guess. I’ve been considering many of them and feel I might need to run through and characterize them more strongly, maybe even change some appearances, but I’m not sure. A lot of this issue stems from the fact that the true dialogue systems aren’t in the game yet. It’s a bit harder to characterize people when all you can really work with is one-liners that they say when you talk to them. Still I thought I’d mention that it’s an idea that I’ve been considering for the future.

Without droning on for too long, I think that’s about it for now. I’ve had a few more bug reports, including one about further animal disappearances which makes me hurt inside. That in mind, I’m hoping to shoot for another small hotfix at the end of this week to take care of the stuff that’s been mentioned. Beyond that, its compendium work and some visual updating. As usual, thanks for your patience with both development and bugs, always appreciated. I hope you all have fun playing and I’m sure you’ll be hearing from me sooner rather than later.