News update 1/31/24

Hello everyone! 

Another month another news post! 

Hope everyone is doing well. 

This post will be a lighter one since we are gearing up for next months update. We finished a bunch of the planned code and are bug hunting. The main thing is giving ourselves the time to actually make sure there isn't any game breaking bugs on the upcoming release.

Programming 

Like I wrote about last month we finished the crafting system. It won't let players make craft duplicates and the items line up once again with the grid. On the back end, I am able to make crafting recipes with a system rather than hand coding it all in. 

As you can see in the image below Minle basically added a new feature to our engine to add in the values of the recipes. This was why, in the past, I was only able to put in like 5 recipes a month.  With this I can do double digits easily, the only limit of new items are now just the art work.     

Aside from that we are started the planning for update 0.0.25. We are thinking of finishing combat and expanding the town map screen so it can be more useful as a hub. We'll share more after 0.0.24.

Art

I'm knee deep in animation land, a lot of the test animations were used to help me get back into animation and getting blender to work with the new workflow we have going on. (Hopefully, we might be getting some help in the future on this.) On top of that, I don't want to show off the current monster as that's going to be one of the major point for the update. I'm pretty much done with the line work and I'm working on coloring. The coding for the monster is done with a new area. I'm in a much better spot than I was before this new schedule. Normally I would have been working on the animation to the day of the update and only code in the monster in the last week. I basically got most of it ready to go this time. This means we can also test out the monster code and catch any bugs with plenty of time to fix it. Once I'm done, I hope to help out with item art. I wanted to see if I could sneak in a new weapon but that might be pushing it.

Music

Music is going great. Since Warden already finished most of the work for this update, I started having him focus on extra music for EOK. One of those being character themes that can play during some scenes. Last month I showed off Avina's theme and this month is now William's turn. You'll be getting more of this soon as Maria's theme took a bit longer than normal. I might show it off on the discord. William's theme will be down below in the download links if you want a listen.

Testing

Good news for you testers. I'm sorry for the delay, but we will be having the test server updated with the first run of the server coming Wednesday. We've had delay after delay but we are ready to start using it. We will post more about this on discord. 

New Polls!

We'll start having some new polls for EOK. We have our knights all set but we decided to get some help for important side characters that you'll meet in set locations.  A new poll will be posted soon. This one will be for patrons only. I'll switch between public and closed polls moving forward as hosting two of them at the same time was rather a tad too much. As always, the higher tier you are the more your vote counts. 

Our first side character is going to be a lovely barmaid. She's known as that town's den mother. After the events of the fog and losing her home to an army of monsters, she ended up looking for a new place to settle. She did find a new place and there she decides to help out to make sure that town doesn't fall. She helps take care of any remaining adventurers or guards and provide shelter or support to those in need. Since the fog, she has a new inner desire that needs to be taken care off and she is more than willing to offer extra services to anyone needing to get rid of the lust energy from the fog. After all, it's the best way to keep the current town safe from going crazy. She's going to be one of the new H scene interactions that doesn't involve combat. 

That's it for now! 

Thank you for the support! 

Next month will be our first big game update of the year and I'm excited for it!