Into The Northern Highlands (Patreon)

Good afternoon,

The week is once again coming to an end, and I wanted to give you all a bit of an impression of what I’ve been working on.

This week’s focus was mostly on creating new assets for the game. One major part of that was the new map I had already started working on last weekend, which continued to keep me busy for several more days during the week. Here a preview of the current state:

On top of that, I also worked on 3 smaller maps. As you can see in the image, this new area contains a few caves, and naturally those also needed fitting environments, the cave maps are now mostly completed. Mostly completed means I’m not quite 100% satisfied yet and still want to add some smaller decorative details.

Besides that, I also worked on new sprites for the ogres themselves. You can already see on the map that I planned a small camp for them there. I completely reworked the old textures used for the ogre model near Calan’s Rest and additionally created sprites for sitting and defeated ogres. On top of that, I also worked on sprites for mountain lions.

I’ve also been playing with the idea of adding another armor set to the game that protects the player from the cold in the northern region. I’m still not entirely sure whether I can implement the mechanic properly in a clean way, but I’m going to try. I’ll probably be able to say more about it once it’s actually implemented next Friday.

Aside from the new assets, I also fixed a number of bugs that were reported through Discord and through PMs. Thanks again for all your reports!

So, moving on to the plans for next week: first of all, there’s still some final work left to do on the maps. I’ll continue working on those today and tomorrow and hopefully finish them up. After that, the plan for next week is to finally start working on the actual story content and the interactions and battles on the new map. I’m hoping to make solid progress on that during the coming week.

Originally, at the beginning of this week, I still hoped I might be able to release a first partial update before my vacation (As a reminder: from 8th of June to 12th of June). But at this point that no longer seems realistic, since I haven’t worked on any new animations or scenes for Tia yet, and I’ve set myself the goal of including at least one new scene in every update. Trying to force an update out by next Friday wouldn’t be a good idea because leaving the game in a buggy state while on vacation would stress me the whole time and I would have to think about it all the time. So I’ll try to release it in the week after that.

Another thing about the update: I’m still undecided about whether I should include scenes with the ogres. I can imagine some of you would definitely want that, but there are already many animations and scenes planned for this update (Tia pregnant in a lot of scenes + Bolgan & Dasan), so I’ll probably move those scenes to a later update or maybe a bonus scene instead. I know that's a bummer, but I have to set some priorities for this update and some cuts are necessary or this will take forever to make.About the next content poll: I forgot to mention that last Friday, of course there will be a new content poll for 0.6.4.0. The prevote, to determine the next addition to the poll, was already running over the past week and currently it looks like Snikka & Nibblina (votes from SS & Patreon counted together) will be the next addition to the poll. The content poll will be started later today.

That’s where things currently stand.I’m going to continue working on the maps for a bit longer now, and I wish you all a nice weekend!