Rowinda in her typical serious attire, featuring the Madness spell 😀

This Spring will be the Season Of The Wolf (when I’ll release the first beta of this game). So technically I have time until the 21st June 😉

Jokes apart as I said in previous post too, I hope to have the beta done by next month. The extra delay is due to some last minute decisions: as you can notice from the screenshot above, I decided to remove the skilltree system, allowing the players to decide which skill to learn in any order.

This also means that each character will have 12 unique skills, no more variations like Blizzard I, II & III. Of course, some skills are variations of others, I don’t claim that I have made over 100 skills ALL UNIQUE! 🙂 However, I really feel I have pushed the original Loren RPG framework to its limits in this game, some spells/skills are quite interesting.

The beta will include only the first Season (Winter), but at least will give people a good idea of what to expect if they decide to pre-order the game. A part of delay is also due to new random enemies that I need to do (wild animals, etc) and also to the tileset system:

SOTW will feature an isometric multi-screen map with hotspots to explore

Now don’t expect a scrollable map, but the map can be split into several screens, so I can make bigger maps. There’ll be various “hotspots”, marked with arrows:

• a green arrow means that the interaction will be completely safe (like traveling to another zone)
• an orange arrow means that there’s the risk of some encounters. In the screen above you can check the trap to see if you caught any wild animal, but there’s the risk of being attacked
• a red arrow means that you’ll surely face an hostile encounter (wandering bandits, a monster, etc)

I’m considering if to add a golden arrow to display the current objective, but I don’t think I’ll need it since the main plot is rather simple, at least in the first part.

Anyway, I spent the last week on the new skills (still need to finish them) and also in adding hidden stuff in the map. For example a graveyard location that can be explored for a big sidequest, and subsequently also to do some good old skeleton skulls bashing 🙂

I am also going to implement a sort of limited grinding: there’ll be a simulated time in the game, so players will be able to explore, but when they reach the next key event “deadline”, the plot will advance. This way, I can make sure that the player don’t grind up to level 30 (the level cap) only in the first part of the story! 😀

That’s all for now, I have more news for the other games, but will keep them for the next weeks, so I have something to write!