Hi

Yes, it's been awhile since we posted. We are not dead... completely. Much has happened in the past week or so. Here is a brief overview:

-NASA announced the discovery of an Earth-like planet only 1400 light-years away
-Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner said some shit
-Miranda Lambert and Blake Shelton are getting divorced

Now, on the Bevontule development front:

-Several days were spent downloading a new Unity demo (and Unity 5.1.2 grooooan), which provided us with a few new character models/terrains/ideas. This was a truly painful experience for a number of reasons, but without getting into too much detail, we have a pretty kick-ass model for Apolith, which we will show at some point... maybe. One day.

-Random battle transitions are now working properly (mostly), including the BattleZone framework (discussed in a previous post). This allows us to assign 'areas' within the world map, which describe the type of enemies to be encountered there as well as their probabilities of being encountered. Additionally, the encounter rate can be set as well. Once battle is completed, the character is returned to the original position in the world map. However, if only one character survives the battle, the game goes into an infinite loop for some reason. I maintain that this is a feature.

-A new animator framework has been implemented using the override controllers discussed in a previous post as well. This is a pretty huge deal. Without going too much into it, we can use the same controller for literally every character. Huge savings on memory, runtime performance, complexity, et cetera, which are things we all like.

-The combat turn bar has been completely reworked. Characters now execute their abilities correctly and this is reflected in the turn bar. There will definitely be a battle video in the upcoming week or so showing this.

-Targetable enemies/allies now glow/highlight when they can be targeted. Previously, there was no indication of which enemies you could target aside from looking inside the target area itself. Now there is.

-We have greatly expanded our list of assets/animations/materials et cetera. Yes, money was spent. We are not happy about it. But it was necessary. I mean, really, having a roof above your head isn't uh... that important, is it?

-Much research has been done in terms of scene optimization, including object batching, light map/light probe creation and utilization. This will probably cause us to redo some of our scenes from the ground up, but it will be well worth it (we've noticed framerates tanking pretty hard in certain situations).

-The scene for Molsha (our first real 'dungeon') has been created and we're both working through what that should look like. It's pretty sweet. I'm not biased though.

Talk to ya'll in a month or so!