Hi friends!

Man, what a week. This week involved a ton of QA (important, but man it’s like pulling teeth) along with adding a bunch of additional content for the game.

By and large, this was a Groa/Csaba/Tomi patch, bringing them into a really good place with their storylines and their quests. The patch adds a new quest - “Hunting Party” - that Groa can give you. “Giving Back” was actually already added in a separate patch a little while back. In addition, we’re now tracking Csaba and Groa’s marriage by a relationship meter, and you’ll see their dialogue change as their marriage unravels.

The big improvements in this patch are also to the other quests for that family unit - “Bring Him Home,” “Man’s Best Friend,” and “Boy’s Best Friend.” Bring Him Home had dozens of bugs that made it likely it would crash the game unless you did it in one very particular way. It’s been heavily reworked. As part of it, a lot of extra dialogue has been added.

Another quest, “Family Time,” was added in this patch. I talked about it last week, but what I didn’t mention is that it’s a way to get the pocket watch. The watch is a pretty valuable tool; in case Sandor dies on the first night, or you fail The Second Son, I wanted to give you another opportunity here to get it.

A handful of people reported some confusion with the UI, since the tool window assumed you were using a controller. It will now correctly detect if you’re using a controller and update accordingly. Key bindings will come eventually, but it’s a slightly bigger project for me. (RPG Maker doesn’t make it easy, short of the F1 menu, which I hate).

As always, a ton of extra bug fixes. We’re narrowing down hard toward Early Access.

This weekend, we’re headed to the first ever GaymerX East! Come get your diversity-in-games fix and play the latest Vidar demo. If you plan to attend, make sure to buy your tickets in advance, as I’ve been told they will not be selling tickets at the door.

Additionally, the Linux build has been uploaded to Steam! Keys are going out to Kickstarter backers this week who specifically told me they wanted Linux. After that, we’ll be done with all keys to Kickstarter backers, and will move on to Direct Download links.

Onward to the next patch, which will give Gusztav a little bit of extra love!

Alpha 0.7.4.0

Quests

• New Quest: Family Time. Get it from Cecilia, but it’s time limited

• New Quest: Hunting Party. Get it from Groa, once he’s healed up and ready.

Boy’s Best Friend

• Cail now spawns in the Water Cave when receiving this quest

Bring Him Home

• Completely restructured quest; removed dozens of progress-blocking bugs

• Added additional dialogue for all potential helpers

• Added additional dialogue for Csaba

• When Groa is in your party, he can be instructed to hang back so you can solve puzzles; you still need to get him back in your party to exit the room

• The bottle of purified water, and the bottle of enhanced water, can no longer be consumed

• All potential helpers can now ID an enoki mushroom midway through the quest

• Choosing “no” when adding the mushroom to the water will no longer take away the mushroom anyways

• Added a rare path to obtain to obtain the quest which will bypass a few steps - it’s not easy, though!

Dr. Spore

• Picking up a mushroom will no longer reveal “Dr. Spore” if it wasn’t already given to you by Gusztav

Man’s Best Friend

• The journal now correctly updates

• Cail properly leaves when returning to town

• The correct rewards are distributed for this quest

• This quest correctly completes as soon as you come back to town

The Second Son

• Text on completion displays better

To Feed a Village

• Fixed a bug concerning Fish spoilation

Puzzles

• Fixed a bug related to light pillar activation

• Fixed a bug related to wall lantern activation

• Split the puzzle in Boulder Cave 4 into three pieces, so you can reset each separately

• Fixed several crashes related to Dark Cave Room 2

• Altered Ice Cave 4 so that quest items are still reachable after solving the puzzles

• Added a blue torch at the entrance to the wolf cave

• Fixed a crash if entering water with a bucket in inventory

Dialogue

• Added 15 new cutscenes

• Borbalo will no longer stay out in the cold forever after Sandor dies

• Csaba will no longer stay outside once Tomi dies; her dialogue has been updated

• Csaba will grieve Groa outside

• Csaba is now aware when her son is dead

• Rozsa’s dialogue better reflects if Sandor died on first night

• Dani goes outside to mourn Tamas

• Canceling when Mihaly asks you if you have any requests will keep the current music playing

• Groa will now stand outside to mourn Tomi and Csaba; his dialogue has been updated for both

• Fixed a bug where the completion date of failed quests was not being calculated correctly (this impacts a fair number of dialogues)

• Various text fixes

Misc

• Profession changes / inheritance now actually loads from a save file

• The Tool UI now recognizes whether you have a Gamepad plugged in, and displays a keyboard key for tool use if you don’t have one

• Various tile passage fixes

• Fixed various bugs related to Erik’s Cave, including UI

• Tamas’ black-and-white sprite on the load screen has been fixed

• The Shovel tool’s icon matches the rest

• The “tunnel” nameplate in the Dark Cave tunnel no longer shows up

• Fixed the transfer from the ladder in the Dark Cave tunnel

• The lantern tool now displays light before you acquire it

• The player must face the correct direction to pick up the music box

• When electing to stay in a room after viewing the Teleport Menu, the room’s music will resume

• Fixed an occasional crash related to particle effects

• Groa’s grave no longer displays prematurely

Dean is the head of Razbury Games, developer of Vidar, an RPG Puzzler Where Everyone Dies. Pre-order it on the website to play it right now, and keep in touch with twitter.