Hello everybody. For starters I wish everybody reading this post a happy 2016.
Exceptions for those who wish me a crappy 2016, I’ll see if I can open a black hole for them or something :-P

Well, I’m sorry to inform you that not much has happened the past days. First of all, it was Christmas for me too, and that means I too had a busy couple of days. Next I’ve been in a bad shape. First I was a bit exhausted after too much work and when that was about to be cured I suffered from Otitis and during the treatment I even appeared to have my eardrum perforated. I’m still under medical checkup for that.

Plus I also have a project running outside gaming which takes priority at the present time. That project is in its final stage, however I decided to try to pick up some parts of the game nevertheless. That project takes me less time everyday, and I’m getting a littlebit bored.

So basically today is my first day on this game again after I had to suspend the project two or three weeks ago. But I feel like I’m all up for it again.

Just before I suspended the game development I did completely finish the optional dungeon “The Black Castle”. The place is a bit of a parody to “The Dark Side of the Force”, so yeah, all similarities with Star Wars are intentional but no, not an attempt to “steal” their glory. (As you know, even though the game has a serious story a few more parodies to famous science fiction works can be found in the game. And not only scifi, I can tell you that).

As a reward for solving the Black Castle, you will be able to view your bestiary on board the Hawk. Implementing that feature is my next focus as far as the game is concerned. Once that feature has been implemented things may be a little fun for all of us. The people who already played the demo, will know that the aliens named Astrilopups are the most important enemy in the story now. In the next mission that I’m gonna script out you are going to visit them on their own planet. And of course, you can guess that the Astrilopup’s hospitality comes rather close to hostility. So yeah, it will be a rather “pleasant” visit. The story is however also coming more and more to a point that I can reveal less and less about my activities. I hate that as I value transparency as much as possible. After all I have a live worklog and an open agenda annex bugtracker for a reason, but I’ll need to be careful what I say there, as the danger for spoilers is now really getting closer, and I don’t want those spoilers to roam free before the full game is even out. I can reveal that at the end of this Astrilopup mission the first very important revelation of the story will be done, and that’s all you’re getting of me for now. I suppose that’s the big bummer in story-driven games, eh?
I will tell you as much as I can in the upcoming time, but I must be as spoiler-proof as possible. This is gonna be a challenge. Well I faced it before when I made The Secrets of Dyrt so I’m pretty sure I can face that one again.

And so far my talking, as I’m wasting time while I could be developing. I’m going to start up my Lua IDE software and get scripting on the Bestiary, right away.

Hang on folks, I’ll keep you updated.
May the stars shine bright tonight.

Jeroen