Right! You may not have heard from me for a while but I promise there was reason for it. Let's dive straight into progress!

The new dungeon is proceeding apace with some new tileset reworks, and some new monster sprites are in development! I'll quickly share some of these with you.

Here we have the stone and ice portion of the caves reworked, unfortunately they will require some readjustments in order to blend again. A lot of redesigns will have to happen, but I'm looking forward to making this dungeon look as good as I can for you all!

The Incubator Zone and the Blighted Cave areas have gotten new wall and ceiling tiles, and you can still see some blending issues need resolution. I've also taken the liberty you will notice of upgrading the quality of some of the decorations such as the bone spikes, and I hope I can get similar quality out of more of the assets of the tileset.

For those of you wondering what the overworld will look like, I have news for that as well! I've started work on the Sacred Valley tileset, and this is the first stab at it, including water, grass, forest, cliff, pathways, chasms, and snow tiles! I've added a few small decorations like big stones, and tufts of grass. More large scale stuff is yet to begin but this is my preliminary teaser of the new Sacred Valley. Please let me know what you think of the new tilesets! (But we have so much more to show off...)

Here we have some of the new sprites being developed, including the Imp and Male Ice Demon. The Imp is done and in game but the male Ice Demon requires more work on the side and upward movement frames.

I also have been busy on some art endeavors, having made a new titlescreen!

Now for gameplay there are far less changes made, in fact I can't remember if I did make any changes in game since my last posting. You'll also forgive me as at the time of writing I've just woken up and started partake of my coffee so there is that. I'll be getting around to in depth testing quite soon, but I need to get further into tilesets as I want to eventually replace all of the graphics for the demo as far as the in game map so there are as few conflicts in design as possible. I might also be looking for avenues to customize the facesets soon as well.

There is actually a funny story I want to share since we're on a conversational portion of the devlog, and that is, originally I intended this titlescreen to be ready weeks ago, but my Epson Scanner I've had for years finally gave up into an endless storm of errors and I couldn't get it scanned. About 600 dollars and several weeks later with much researching, I finally found my replacement, a honkingly giant Plustek OpticPro which can do much much larger paper sizes, so I'm looking forward to a new age of artistic design.

It took a reorganizing of my desk and side table/small dresser to get this bad boy operating, and I didn't get it properly working until I remembered that I was supposed to unlock the scanner head before I actually started testing it. Once I figured out that gem everything worked with minimal delay.

As far as Zephyr and art goes, she was the one who created the Blighted Cave art you saw at the top of the page, and that's mostly all I've had her do as we're in a very good spot artwise and I do not know if I need any more monsters for the immediate present. 'Need'. 

She's also been very busy being a contributor to society so I try my best not to be overbearing with my requests and check ups.

As for MeteoXavier, it was he this time who reached out to me for an update, which must means the heavens aligned in a grand cosmic significance lost to me, but hearing some of his work in a WIP fashion is always a pleasant morning surprise.

If you haven't noticed, I've officially ended the Weekly Devlog format. It was a good run but my ability to maintain the pressure and keep the acceleration going was no longer feasible. My state of being has been lesser of late and it's important that I don't let myself get too burned out or the consequences will last for much longer than if I just paced myself and worked within my limitations.

This is not going to be an excuse to stop regular updates but I want to actually have things to talk about because I'm quite tired of not having tangible things to show and discuss with you all. It wears on my mental state and we've already discussed the ramifications of burnout and productivity. Basically going forward, if I don't have anything to talk about, you won't see these posts. I will endeavor to forewarn you guys however if I intend to take an extended break or hiatus, so don't worry about that. I need to worry less about the next devlog and more about making the content needed to necessitate a devlog. 

This next couple of weeks I aim to finish the tileset work and have some rebuilt maps to share with you all, so look forward to that. I might also try and really break in this scanner with some updated character art (the action cutin graphics could use a facelift, plus I need to theory craft facesets anyway...) There's also sprites that need work as well as actual playtesting the reduced size demo, so needless to say I have many avenues to pursue for progress. Until next time everyone, take care!