Meanwhile.

Shush moratorium.

Despite the proclaimed moratorium, the situation has improved somewhat and... deteriorated significantly at the same time. Yeah... So perhaps I should report it.

On the one hand... The blackouts have become more sane, sometimes there's even electricity all day long. So that aspect is no longer affecting my work as much as it did last month.

On the other hand... I'm from Kharkiv. Those who follow the news on this war have already figured it all out. And those who don't... You know what? Keep it up. I try not to follow the news noise either. Too bad in my circumstances, it's not always possible.

Now for something more pleasant.

Previous vote.

The majority voted in favor of clarifying the Ability descriptions. So be it. It's not a high priority at all, but it has now been added to the "to-do" list. I'm now leaning more towards a small, organic expansion of the descriptions in aspects that weren't very clear in the original variants.

By the way, if you have suggestions/corrections, etc. - now is still the time to offer them. There is no urgency, and in any case, they should be ready only by the time the update itself is released. Because after that it will be too late, indeed ;)

Readiness of update 1.7

I'd say somewhere around 50%. Still no exact release date, I think it's understandable why. I want to finish the update by the end of this month. Too bad it doesn't always work out the way I want it to.

Anyway, in about 2-3 days before, when the update is 100% ready, I'll post here. In those 2-3 days, I plan to do "deep testing" of the entire update (i.e. 1.6 to 1.7), so to speak, to see everything holistically as a single episode.

So, stay subscribed, keep your email notifications up, and you'll be in the know when the update hits your hands.

A little bit about the content of 1.7 (no spoilers).

Some of the dialogues turned out to have quite a complex... structure? It's probably better to visualize here.

This is how a relatively "simple" sequence looks in the game engine:

As you can see everything is neat, arrows consistently lead from one moment to another.

And this is what a piece of one of the dialogs in 1.7 looks like:

What a mess, huh? Given that the game doesn't run you through the same lines and doesn't put you in loops, this is the kind of dialog structure that assumes you'll only go through certain "squares" once. And the sequence can be any order you want (I don't know what options you'll choose exactly, after all). So, yes, balancing dialogs like this can be a bit difficult. Testing too. But that's okay. There have been these things before and there will be more. And they have a very high replayability.

To some extent, now I'm "shoving" into 1.7 what was supposed to be in 1.8 to actually unload the planned content burden for 1.8. There's a lot planned for it, so moving some of the events/dialogs to 1.7 seems reasonable to me. But this, alas, slows down work on 1.7 itself. So please be patient. I'm working as fast as I can.

Well... that's it.

I'm unlikely to post anything else here until the aforementioned moment of 100% update readiness and 2-3 days before the update itself is released. But in any case, regardless of the circumstances, I will keep working - don't worry. And thank you all, for your words of support and high (sometimes, perhaps, even too high) evaluations of my work. It motivates me a lot. Thank you!