As promised, we are back at the end of another month to update you on what we've been doing in Septaroad Voyager. Behind the scenes, we are getting everything organized for the main campaign. We made a wiki where we are sharing mood boards and inspiration, discussing the feel and look of various places. I'm finally writing out the script for all of the characters' stories. And getting things down on paper (or the digital equivalent) is really helping me to stay organized. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43178456/36e04ca22b6d19bcf883596d20388f7cb7c1bb6d.jpg[/img] For the characters' stories, I am following a template well known and loved (or hated) among scriptwriters. It's called [i]Save the Cat![/i] and it's an excellent guide for solid story structure. As for the tangible things you can see in the game right now, the towns of Utakawa and Ramliyah are accessible in the randomly generated campaign currently available, so long as the route to those towns doesn't go through an unavailable location. There's not much to do there yet. But the maps are in the game. I'm making progress on the card dueling minigame. Right now I'm working on the enemy AI for picking cards. I have also been building the main campaign. We created each of the seven starting characters, who are all customizable, and we are in the process of building each of their introductory chapters. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43178456/a105af941cb5422bfd512babe00a8348615e8bb2.jpg[/img] Each character's story will start with a dream. This is a tiny look at Emmerich's dream. We're continuing to face some technical challenges and bugs inherited from the old version of Unreal we're using. But we're working our way through them and adding lots of fixes and new features. If you noticed our patch notes this month, you will have seen quite a few changes. Some of them are immediately applicable. Some of them are laying the foundation for the full campaign still to come. Here is a summary: [list] [*]Changed location of saved games. This will help prevent messes if multiple accounts log into the same device. Also, 32-bit and 64-bit executables now save in the same location and their games will be accessible from a 32-bit or 64-bit executable on another device. The game will automatically copy your saved files to the new save location. You will need to play one more time on the device containing your most recent saved games in order for the saved game files to reach the cloud and your other devices. [*]Default walking speed is a little slower. Hold down shift to run. Running will cancel any actions currently charging. [*]Enemies move a little slower. [*]You can now use the mouse to click on a target instead of clicking in the menu to choose the target of an action. [*]Default key for interaction is now F. New defaults will be loaded when you load the game. If you customized your keybindings, you will need to change them again. [*]Loot drops do not explode away from defeated enemies but now drop on the ground nearby [*]Lots of new enemy names. Tiered goblins, orcs, boar, cultist knights, cultist warlocks, necromancers, scrapper mechanics, scrapper alchemists all have new names. [*]An enemy not currently in combat that dodges or blocks an attack now enters combat as intended Enemies in the intro attack faster. [*]More DOF blur to background and foreground [*]Steal ability now has its own sound effect, will not use weapon's default sound (no more shooting sounds when stealing while gun equipped) [*]Cosmetic improvements--such as lighting and texture brightness--in several places. [*]Characters can now play up to 3 sound effects simultaneously, greatly reducing sound effects getting cut off. [*]The depth-of-field blur is now a bokeh blur. This requires a video card that can run DX11 and it's more taxing on the video card. In the future we can make a simple gaussian blur fallback for DX9 cards and slower DX11 cards. [*]Cleave now has a description indicating that it can hit two targets. [*]AoE abilities no longer affect non-combat NPCs. [*]Fixed a visual bug where the description of the previous ability appeared when reopening the ability menu. [*]The player can now close the map with the M key (or the key mapped to the map). [*]Enter and spacebar can be used to press the selected menu button. [*]Fixed bugged text in the instructions for switching characters. [*]Preparatory work for adding story characters to the game. [*]Force the game to load post process settings. In some cases the game would load without post process settings and effects such as the Sobel edge outline, vignette, and bokeh blur were not showing correctly. [*]Better camera transitions. In some cases, when transitioning between levels, or when starting a new character, the camera would glitch to a location that is not meant to be seen in the game. We now have a fix for that. This has to be set up manually for each case of a character- or level-transition, so we will keep our eyes open for other places where this happens. [*]Character customizer menu now fully supports default characters, for one default gender, or for characters who can be changed to a different gender. [*]Character customizer supports different starting equipment loadouts, different starting character classes, and different starting abilities. This is necessary for the upcoming campaign where different characters start with different equipment and abilities. [/list] We are still adding and fixing more all the time and we're making progress toward the main campaign. We look forward to sharing it with you soon. Thank you for continuing to support Rockwell Studios as we develop Septaroad Voyager. We'll see you next month with more news.