It's been a few weeks since the last update, but there are good reasons.

The Reasons

First one is work. I'm being put through a year long course, but the online portions were incredibly broken to the point where I had a months worth of coursework to do in a few week so I could actually start the course. Then a 3-day tutorial followed by a 5 day piece of coursework I am still working on. On top of that, work itself is eating too much time. The coursework should be partially during work hours, but barely any has been in work hours so far.

I was also ill.

Where are we at?

Buckle the fuck in...

• I set up a new foliage system with less models but more randomisation
• Game now records the players location every time the profile saves, to enable loading back in where you quit
• Item pickups were completed
• Item collection prompts, dialog and animation unlocks all moved to HUD
• Dialog system, improved from last time
• NPCs built so they can either be randomised or you can set what you want
• NPCs given genders and species
• NPCs get clothing
• species are split so you have wolves, foxes, canids, etc with specific skins for each type
• Enemies updated with the NPC generation system
• Wolves given a male and female type
• Quest system rebuilt
• Pineridge completely rebuilt with all NPCs, new item locations, secrets, more NPCs, questline and props
• Female enemies can now use the voyeur/exhibitionist system
• Female enemies can now recover from rocks instead of just staying unconcious
• Animation Unlock system totally rebuilt
• Upper Valley / Release level added and rebuilt

So, the big update is the game can now be played right through to the title card in the Upper Valley level. The next steps will be in to the forest map then randomised levels, and after that it's just playtesting and bugfixing before release. Pineridge is finally back in, and 100% ready to go, as is the Upper Valley.

One thing that has been removed is the Animation Gallery. This is a little bit of a nuisance. The way it needed to integrate with the new framework would have meant rebuilding it would take several days. That would then need a second rebuilt at the end of Phase 2 when Male player characters are added. So the decision was made to just leave that part out and do a proper rebuild in a few months time rather than waste time now.

Another thing I wasn't expecting, was for the new NPCs skeleton/skin system working quite how it did. It was a pain to get working, and I was happy with it until I went in to the character creator and discovered allowing those species in the species list as playable just worked. There were a few tweaks, but the upshot is that you can select several playable female characters with no problem. I hadn't expected it to work, but it did.

Finally

It looks like the rebuild is coming to an end. In theory, 3 more levels to rebuild, though I've been looking into procedural generation again and might redo the open forest levels with true procedural stuff. We'll see.