Inner Circle Update for December 17 2016!

Hey guys!

I'm happy to finally give you a small glimpse into what we are planning for V0.06.  The goal is to have a solid preview ready by the next monthly progress update.  Below are the images I've prepared for this week's update, including an HD wallpaper of the scene pictured above.

Images and Content for this Update on Google Drive 

New Demos Being Added to Soundtrack Reward

Audio guy has already pumped out 7 new soundtrack demos, one of which is posted above for your listening pleasure.

With all these awesome ideas being generated, I thought it'd be a neat thing to add a 'Demos' set to the $15 reward tier in addition to the official soundtrack.  This way patrons at that tier can not only grab the latest soundtrack, but also hear the evolution of new tracks as they are being produced as well as ideas that don't make it into the final game.  Expect the first set to go up in a couple of hours!

Intro to V0.06 - Motorcycle Scene

While I'm still in the process of fleshing out story details for V0.06, I thought the best thing to do for inspiration was to set the mood with something visual.  Therefore, I've been giving the new workstation its first real trial by fire by making an animated story scene to act as the transition to the new area.  Since this is the player's introduction to the urban dystopia that the majority of the game will be centered around, I obviously wanted to attempt something interesting, and this idea has been in my head for a long time now (those of you that have been around the project awhile may recall when TK and I created the motorcycle).  

I was hoping to have the full animation ready for you tonight, but I got hung up realizing I need to add support for animations to my render manager plugin I coded in October.  That said, at the link above I uploaded a series of work-in-progress images and GIFs detailing the creation process of the scene. 

I like this one enough that I'll probably make it into a new print design as well :D.

V0.06 Environments

When I haven't been bugging TK for help with editing props, he's been working on creating new kitbash sets that we will be using to create the map artwork in V0.06.  

You're probably curious about the level design structure of the new area.  It's something I hope to have additional details for next week, but at the moment the plan is to have a sort of a "town" area as well as an urban hostile area.  The original plan was to make a sewer level, but frankly the entire intro to the game was underground and I thought that something more dynamic would be better (no worries for those interested it he possibilities of a sewer area, it's still happening later on).

At any rate, you can check out TK's work so far in the link above!  

Shops and AltairPL's Progress

What RPG town would be complete without shops?  Creating a basic functional shop UI that works with our interface was part of AltairPL's progress this week.  Here's an update straight from him:

"Even though I haven't slept much this past week and had a lot of work around the house related to upcoming Christmas, I've managed to make a solid progress on battle overhaul -- not as solid as I would like, but I'm still pretty happy, all things considered.  Below is the short and not very detailed list of what I did the past week: 

• This one was unrelated to battle engine, so I want to get it out of the way.  One of my previous overhauls has broken in-game shops.  Unfortunately I had no time to code dedicated shop scene from scratch, so I've just fixed vanilla one and improved one related thing a bit, since it wasn't very complicated and it will probably be useful in the future as well. 
• Finished basic handling of battle actions -- still more to do, but it's working good enough for now, so I can shift attention to other stuff that needs it 
• Planned and started recoding of hold handling.  I had some weird problems with finishers, so I haven't progressed as far as I would like, but I believe it's already more solid than it was before 
• Planned and started overhaul of battle flow (related to battle timings). The current one is working, but it's not as versatile as I would like and has one or two potential flaws that may cause us problems sooner or later. The new iteration is much simpler, much more universal, and will allow even more intricate customization of battle timings 

The coming week will probably be filled with more Christmas crap, but here are my short-term plans for battle overhaul progress: 

• Recode enemy spawning.  This is one of the most bug-prone features and it has to be changed to prevent this happening ever again.  Changes were planned along with other hold changes, so I have a general idea on how to tackle it. 
• Finish remaining hold-related stuff." 

That's about it for now!  Expect more info on V0.06 next week!