Howdy everybody! Time for the 4th round of weekly posting, but with a different spin. Starting now these reports are going to be a bit smaller since we're (mostly) all caught up on the older changes, but that also means the content will be fresh-picked from the past week and will mostly consist of regular progress reports instead of huge showcases. It's more comfortable for me this way, too~

On the writing side of things, Arba has been working hard on an NPC to be encountered out in the wilderness. I'm really enjoying how this characters scenes are turning out, since they have variations that depend on really interesting factors such as your party setup. In fact the scene required something that I wasn't expecting, and although it seemed like a small feature request on the surface it ended up requiring a deep dive into the ancient code for pages and choices. I'm not allowed to say much in detail about what kind of character this is all for though - my beak is shut tight!

I've been spending the last little while pecking away at the linear parts of the introduction so we can get the game into a state where it's actually playable from start to finish. Currently we just use the Editor to write and playtest whatever scenes we want to work on at the time, but having at least the storyline playable in one long package would bring us one massive step closer to a new public build. There's not too much left to complete thanks to a decent chunk being salvageable from the original demo, but it's still a big plate for a small bird. I'm just glad that I'm can step away from tinkering with UI for the time being, because that is a timesink like no other.

I didn't find a great deal of time to spend on code or art this past week, but I'm satisfied with one new feature that I completed: automatic modpack installation! When someone decides to make a mod, large or small, they can package up their work in a .zip file which can be dropped onto the game window to automatically install it. What's especially nice is that mods installed this way won't clutter up or permanently overwrite anything in the /custom/ folder, so managing and uninstalling these mods is completely painless. The focus on ease and reversibility was (mostly) inspired by some terrible experiences while modding Skyrim way back in the early days. Hmm.

Anyway, that's all I've got to share for today. I'm sad that neither Arbajest nor I had much time to spend on the game this past week, but we'll just have to see where the next week can take us~

Thanks for tuning in again, and take care of yourselves!