Just a small update here (I'm literally writing this at midnight so please forgive the lack of conciseness, formatting, and professionalism I generally like to have in these updates)

The battle demonstration's very very very very nearly done. But first, if you will allow me just one dedicated paragraph to complain, because... I feel like it: The battle system has ALWAYS been a massive thorn in my side. It was one of the very first coding bits I started writing when I made the leap to turning Versotale into a game. The sheer number of crucial bugs and oversights with the battle system that I've had to fix has been... absolutely astounding to me. You'd think that the overworld coding would be the worst? Nah, knocked the big components out in maybe a month's time. Maybe accounting for the various edge-cases for dialogue formatting? That was two months maximum with light additions or fixes made every now and again. How about programming in the choice menus? Child's play, that took a singular day. But a black-and-white 640x480 room with turn-based combat and dodging mechanics? Somehow, THAT has been the biggest and most continuous source of frustration for over a year of work!?

Sigh...

All of that to say... I'm happy to report that the battle demo's about 95% done, not counting the recording of it. I'm partly saying this so I kick my ass into third gear and push through this tedious stretch to finish it soon. It's just a brief snippet of three randomly encounterable Haven enemies, with rough attack patterns figured out, and as usual it's just a WIP. So, it's nothing too special. Which is why I do admittedly feel really guilty that I've kept you guys waiting for this next big video for so long only for it to not be super impressive, especially when I grossly overestimated how much work I had left to do in the Early April devlog 4 months ago. To criticize myself, this absolutely should NOT have taken nearly an entire summer to get done, even WITH all the roadblocks I ran into. But luckily a remedy for this problem will be announced alongside the battle demo video (Look forward to that)

And then once the battle demo video is out and (FINALLY!) behind us... I'll be able to actually get back to working on implementing the story! Which... I am very happy about.

In the meantime, I ask that you just wait with patience for a small bit longer! I'll be back hopefully sooner rather than later!

See y'all again relatively soon!