Happy New Year!

2013, here we are.

And here are some news from what happened since the end of December :)

Making the Christmas release has been quite a ride, both very entertaining, and taking a lot of energy, and I've been quite happy to take a back seat for a few days and enjoy spending time with my family and also enjoy other's work done on Valyria as well. ;)

A lot of new activity has also happened during the second of those few days, as some of you already reacted on the forums, by mails, or by opening issues, and I wanted to say that even if I say, 'err, no!' to your feature request or your crazy ideas, I do appreciate you both took the time to try the game, and took the time to take your virtual paper and pen to write back your impressions.

As qubodup said, while answering all the questions and the requests is recommended, it's not always possible. Thus, I'll keep trying to take in account all the questions, flames, impressions, thoughts, requests made for the game while trying also not to forget the story we first wanted to tell, and the game we first wanted to make.

But enough speech, let's look at what happened thanks to the work and feedback of what on can now call the 'Valyria Tear Team'!

Let's first start with Roots, who actually did all the balancing work made on items, and enemies, along with working on improving the loading of the characters stats handling code. (already present in the Christmas release). I couldn't talk about that earlier being short of time, but I still wanted to point that out.


As for the menu mode, IkarusDowned did a lot of master work on it, rewriting all the way the sub-menus are loaded and handled to be more readable and maintainable, and adding support to be able to quick-equip an item from the inventory.

Not only that, but he also added the first working version of a Quest Log! Work is still being done on it, but it's already nice looking, and merged the Formation and Status menu into one.

Codergreen isn't resting as he's steadily working toward a simplified shop mode, which is almost working so far. More to come on this!

As for me, if you've tried the X-Mas release and finished it, you'll know what happened at the end. And I've reused a part of it to add the actual introduction of the game.



While keeping polishing the Half-Episode I content, I've also been trying to answer the call of reports made both on the forums and in issues by adding hints gently provided by qubodup on the first hide'n'seek "quest", updating translations also gently provided by NaN (German), and BioHazardX (Italian).




I also fixed the fade out not done when quick changing maps, turned the music fade out/in into states making them correctly handled when restoring the music state in-game, and several other adjustments like the addition of a key quick-help at game start that some will appreciate:

Last but not least, I've simplified the first battle tutorial dialogue to make it more readable and not entering the details too much, especially for characters that have only one skill, and players that might be completely new, and added a nice 'look here!' hand cursor animation. ;)

A new actual release candidate is planned to be out in a few days from now, so I hope you'll enjoy the new features and bug fixes done on it compared to the 2012 release.

Regards,