Hi, dungeon-crawling fans! It's time for another update! This month I am in the middle of creating Beta Patch 4. While doing so I decided to release a small interim patch to fix some of the issues of Beta 3 and introduce the new trading system. As always you can find the video devlog and its transcript below: [previewyoutube=eClZy-55zVA;full][/previewyoutube] See you soon and best wishes, Michael ---------------------------------- Hi, dungeon-crawling fans! It is time for another update on Monomyth! As you know last month Beta 3 started. Since then I have been working on Beta 4 and implemented numerous improvements as well as a new trading system. These newly implemented features will be added shortly in a small interim patch. So let’s go through all these things in detail. First, let’s take a look at a few more general things that I have fixed throughout the last few weeks. I finally found the time to reimplement weapon load-outs on the new codebase, as they were present in the original Kickstarter demo. Now your character can wear two different sets of weapons and quickly switch between the two in a combat situation. Alternatively, you can also use this to quickly stow away torches, so you are not seen by enemies. In terms of level design, I added shortcuts between different areas as well as fast traveling from designated points in the game. You have seen these fast travel points before, except now that all areas are in the game they are active and usable. Together with the shortcuts, these changes make the world feel significantly more interconnected and backtracking becomes less of a problem. Of course, I have also worked on the game’s main hub. This will be the main area of Beta Update 4. Players will find most traders in this hub as well as an anchor point for the game’s main quest. Concerning quests I have added another small fix: Instead of having quest items clutter up the player’s inventory, the latest version of the game now features a dedicated quest inventory. This was another small feature I finally had time to transfer from the old codebase. However, in this version of the game, any item type can be a quest item. In the original demo, this flag was technically limited to regular combinatory items, meaning no consumables, weapons, or anything with specific functionality. The quest inventory itself works much like an item bar you would see in a point-and-click adventure game. It isn’t limited in size and you can just pull items from it to combine them within the game world. This works very well together with the menu-world interactions I implemented a couple of months ago. But now let’s come to this month’s main feature. As I mentioned during the last update the latest version of Monomyth will feature an entirely new trading system. The system from the demo has been completely replaced by a barter trading system that is similar to that of Ultima Underworld. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/33913785/8fe624180f459fbf525b3a7b89f787cdcf91eab2.png[/img] The system itself is relatively simple. Go up to an NPC and open the trading menu. The menu consists of four windows two of which are your and the NPC’s inventory. In the middle, you will find the offer windows. Just pull the items you wish to buy from an NPC into their offer window and do the same with items you wish to get rid of on the player’s side. Do this until the total values of the two offers match. You can also make a monetary offer to balance out value differences. Characters with the “Speech” skill can try to haggle. Simply make a slightly undervalued offer and click consider. The little output window on the left will tell you whether or not this is a feasible deal and if your character has a chance to make it work. There is a little bit of luck involved in this as well since concluding such a trade will automatically do a skill check. If your character fails this check the trading attempt will fail as well. If you do this too often, the NPC will temporarily refuse to trade with you. Along with this system, I also made a few changes to basic inventory management. A small feature that was long overdue was proper stack management. Up until now, it was never really necessary to handle specific amounts of items, however, with the trading system this was finally implemented. I think, for the moment, this should cover all the typical features you’d expect from a drag-and-drop inventory system. As I mentioned in the beginning I added all these features in a small interim patch which will release shortly. After that, I will continue with Beta 4’s content, which will mostly cover the game’s main quest. Once that is done, I will need to polish a few things and the game will finally be ready for the Open Backer Beta. I am not entirely sure about the mode of that beta yet. I could imagine repeating all area focus tests from the closed beta, except with a significantly shorter iteration time. This would mean you would get to test the game step by step, area by area, with a new area opening, for example, every two weeks. This could have the advantage that tests would be more thorough. People could take their time and really explore the details of each area. Alternatively, I could also just open the latest closed beta with all areas available. I am not yet sure how I will go about this but I guess we will see throughout the coming weeks. Either way, stay tuned for more updates, and see you soon!