This is quite early, but I had a free week and did a lot of work on the game. Here are some of the things I worked on.

Extended tutorial

I watched someone play the game and I also got some useful feedback from other people. Many got "filtered" by the giant chicken at the start of the game and generaly had little idea what to do. This is mainly my fault. Game does very bad job introducing mechanics and most people playing it for the first time expect another simple RPG maker game, which this is definitely not.

I decided to add a hint system. If you decide to do the tutorial, buch of question marks will spawn around the world. Interacting with them will tell you something useful, like how fast travel works, how combat hurts mood and mainly how weak you are at the start of the game. These question marks disappear after you interact with them so they won't clutter the world forever, and you can also disable / enable them at any time from the options menu.

Signposts

Another sugestion was to make level transitions more clear. This was definitely a problem in some areas, so I added signposts with arrows showing where level transitions are. 

I also changed graphics for construction sites in your hideout to make it a little more obvious what they actualy are.

Sprites for age 17 and new weapon placement

I finished all necesary sprites for last age stage and also decided on the new look of weapons being displayed on your character.

Just to give you an idea how much this change helped me. Before this re-work, weapon folder contained around 2500 images. Now it has only about 500. Doing all those old sprites must have took me around 50 hours. Redoing all of them into the new system took me around 3 hours.

As I said in previous post, I will use this to add more mutations, more weapons, outfits, body variations and so on. I'm still not fully decided yet.

The new system is not as good looking as the old one, but I think it is better than having no visible weapons at all. Besides, doing those sprites is extremely fast now. I can make sprites for one weapon for all outfits and age stages in a matter of minutes.  Ignore the broken overworld sprites in following screenshots. That's what happens when you skip age stages for screenshots.

Not a perfect solution, but makes more of the outfit visible, not covered by belts and you still get to see the weapons you wear.

Animated main menu

I also decided to experiment with the main menu a bit. This is mostly a prototype and it won't be in the game for long I think. I mainly wanted to try a few different things.

• Animated background
• Title fading in
• Image-based menu buttons
• Menu changing depending on players progress

None of these are revolutionary and most other games have these, but I wanted to experiment with them a little myself. Found out doing this is much easier than I thought (code wise. Art is completely different matter).

As always, I might add even more to the next update. I still have to finish the hangout options for the NPC and tie down a few loose ends, but I will most likely release the update in later half of this month. Stay cool.