Upcoming Update

 Hello everyone, it's been more then a month since our last update, which was mostly about technical improvements. With this update we plan to bring some new content as well as polishing some old ones as always. 

 I know we are mostly silent about our progress, it's mostly because we were not sure about a lot of things like the current state we are currently in and the what we aim to do in future. So thinking about what we are doing and how are we going to do it was somewhat cumbersome so instead we just choose to pour our energy into doing what we had in mind at that time.  

 But as things take shape, I can now see our current state and the path ahead of us much clearer then before. Making an open world game is challenging, even if it was not our first  project, it would probably still be. We learned a lot and we still hope to do so. I started this project with intent of making it a simple one, but we got greedy after thinking about the potential and also we didn't want to make it sloppy. Though I have to admit that this slow progression is exhausting for us, so we aim to be more organized from now on and maintain a steady release schedule.

 Also we now have a music composer on our team! He made the forest track in v0.5.3.3 and you'll be hearing more of his soundtracks from now on! 

Those aside, now I want to talk about this months progress

 For a long time, creating and adding story and dialogues just by using Gamemaker was really pain. So before actually getting into writing, I needed a proper, long term solution. In past I tried using Twine but unfortunately it's horrible mess with countless bugs. Then I found an app called Yarn, which lets you create your own stories using it's branching tree system and since it allows .json export, I integrated it into my systems easily within 1 week. It was always a topic I was afraid to approach but now it's something I look forward to!

 After that, I needed to touch my old place holder AI system. It wasn't actually a challenge since this time I knew what I wanted to do. But before that I also needed to tweak another system, player entity.

 Since beginning, I programmed player and NPC's completely different. Everything about them worked different. This resulted in double amount of work. I had this idea of making every character playable for a long time, which would give much more freedom for future scenarios and I wouldn't have to program player different from every other character. Even though I wasn't sure if I was going to let player control other characters, that feeling of freedom was irresistible(it seems like a good idea so I just might when the opportunity shows up). 

 Now NPC's are controllable(only in debug mode) and they also support Yarn, so we'll be doing a lot of writing for story and NPC interactions(player-NPC, NPC-NPC). In the mean time, this time we hope to come with much more meaningful story and dialogues, and I'm also remaking some maps since they didn't make sense from the beginning.

 I also added support for infinite amount of items and skills, so hopefully our process of adding those will be lot more smoother from now on.

 If things go as expected, with this version I'll be also introducing new shader effects instead of our current lightning system(which is not really that bad, but it wasn't really good either). Though since shaders are a new thing for me, I might not be able to make it in time.

 About the artwork(ShySeel)

 There were a lot of animation and character reworks for the past months. After completing the Ryle, Vaeh and Gwun and their special animations I will move onto some of the old monsters and the village. There are still a lot to cover when it comes to remaking old content but I want to make it interesting by adding new maps and creatures meanwhile.

 Making the Alchemist has been my first indoor building experience and it will be easier building NPC houses and Blacksmith after this.

Conclusion

 Everything we are doing this update will define the basic structure of our game. As I said before, we couldn't see where we are going with this project before, but now we know which direction we want to go. Of course I knew what kind of game I was going to do when I first started working on this project, but in time this become much bigger then I originally planned. So we plan to make this update more than just technical improvements and make it the beginning of our steady progression.