October in Review

Evening all, welcome to November! As usual, you can find the free release of v0.45.1 up on the blog! This month will be cleanup time on the rest of the mid-game development phase tasks, with a few remaining big-ticket items left to knock off, and then some smaller items I'll probably want to check off before moving properly into the end-game phase. I talked in some detail about these tasks last month, so this month I'll just focus on detailing what's left:

• 3 more Director scenes need office upgrade-related edits, as does the 'home' office screen.
• The recruit 'assignment' screen needs to be finished off, and activated for all of the scenes that use recruits. Additionally, some random citizen encounter scenes have hidden recruit requirements (for example, a scene may assume you have at least one Celopi recruit), and those requirements will need to be turned on.

And that's about it for major items! For smaller cleanup, there's:

• An issue with Specialist Loyalty missions - these were written to have encounters occur in a linear way, which worked in the early version of missions but not in the current version with the semi-randomized map. I'll need to put in some special-case work to ensure these missions play out as intended, without encounters being skipped or happening in the wrong order.
• My usual list of backlogged typos and other editing fixes to get to.
• Perhaps a few polishing touches to the Codex.

It may be that I'll check all of these off and get into the end-game phase this month, but if so, I probably won't get very deep into it, so I'll save further discussion of that for next month. On top of that, work of course continues on artwork - a Piledriver scene is currently in progress, and following last month's polls, we'll be getting in a bit more Terran art (including of course everyone's favorite Terran, Hellfire). We've nearly finished all of the artwork that I consider 'must-haves' for the game to be in a satisfactory state, considering there's no budget or time for getting everything drawn, but until the game is actually done there's plenty of extra scenes to keep the art team busy with.

So, in review:

October Accomplishments:

• Functionality and scenes to support making office upgrade choices at each tier.
• Edits to 15 different Director scenes to bring them into line with office upgrades.
• Two new Specialist CGs, from artists Suki and TDK!
• One new set of mission background assets, from artist Vin4ART!

November Forecast:

• Remaining scene edits to account for office upgrade choices.
• Activation of various scene unlock requirements.
• CGs including Piledriver and assorted Terrans.
• Fixes and polishing before moving on to the end-game!

Thanks for playing!