Who's ready to test Shademyre this weekend? There are downloads on the website ( www.swordweaver.com ) for Windows and OSX, and you'll also be able to play from your web browser on computers or smartphones. I've disabled the on-screen controller option for the time being because it's having some issues, but the normal touch controls are pretty good. New Content: Continued the opening of the game to introduce Grum to the party (and added some interactions at the inn before your first night). New map area to the west of town "Infested Farm I". This is the first of EIGHT levels planned in the first act. You can still access the training grounds by talking Gustaf in the town square. It took me about 45 minutes to play through and clear the first level of monsters, but I had characters at level five for testing purposes. With exploring, starting from level 1, and messing with equipment, my guess is it's about 1-2 hours long right now. Remember, you can't get a Game Over. If you are beaten in battle you return to the inn with your progress in place, and if you drown in the acid swamp you wake up on the shore with low HP. Loss of hard fought progress always made me dislike exploring, which is really the point of this game. Depending on how well this is received, the system may change drastically. Let me know what you think. I may reduce the monster count per level because it might get a little monotonous. I definitely want to increase monster variety for more fun battles, and that's where I can use your help testing! I never cared much for battles in RPG, I always just liked exploring (I hope you can tell from how much detail I put into the level design). So anyone who has experience creating monsters (I'm eyeing you DMs/GMs) can help a lot. Known Glitch: when you return to a battle from changing your equipment, a ghost image is left of the characters. This is because I got rid of battle backgrounds in favor of the map view, but I'll probably go back to using backgrounds anyway.

First level is pretty much done. Cleaning a few things up and I think Beta 1.4 will be ready for release.

There are now eight varieties of slime!

It's been a busy week, so no update yet. But there are some good additions I had to make before continuing building levels. There is now a "drowning" system. It doesn't make sense that battle death sends you to the inn but walking in the toxic swamp water gives you a game over. Now the floor damage sends you back to the last safe coastline you were at. The "Area Clear" script is implemented. I still need to tie it into the Town Square bulletin board, but switches are in place to make it all pretty easy. I spent a long time yesterday working on a scripted event with a slime chasing a horse and the horse can kick you out of the way and then the slime chases you. It's a lot more complicated than j thought to have an event like that occur anywhere in a wide area, but I think I got the event actions just right so no matter where the horse kicks you from the scene will make sense and not get stuck. I really want this game to show the effort and care I enjoy in games even though I'm using mostly the RTP and resources based on the RTP.

The farm is coming along nicely.