Happy Friday!

I've been riding a tidal wave of momentum this past month and a half, though I've run into a few hangups in the form of almost one power outage per week thanks to the storms out here. Nevertheless, there's a TON of update material to share with you all so let's dig in!

Worldmap and Random Encounters

First up, I've started populating the brand new shiny world map with props and locations:

Going hand in hand with the map, the randomly generated encounters system is up and running, and supports as many darn rooms and layouts as I want!

To explain: The above illustration illustrates a 5x5 grid, and a series of layouts. Each square on the grid is a room (or screen, if you will), that houses all the baddies and environment art the player might run into depending on what biome they are currently in, time of month and day, and how the weather is. One of these layouts allow for me to snap together a series of these "rooms" to create a sort of mini-stage. A different experience or scenario every time you run into a wandering bad guy, or any sort of other encounter generated on the overworld map!

These screens are chosen from hundreds of handmade rooms like these:

These rooms will generate cool things like treasure, unique boss fights, secrets - all sorts of things, including ore nodes and harvestable trees.

Speaking of which:

Resources and Crafting

Wood as a crafting resource, harvestable trees and ore nodes have been added! These harvestable trees will spawn different "looks" to them based on your map location.

The old system only had one crafting resource: Ore. Ore was treated as almost more of a crafting token - a catch all number where to craft a new sword, you simply needed X amount of ore. I've expanded the system to include wood, ore, hide, and bone. But how do you go about acquiring hide and bone, you ask?...

Animal corpses (and, if you wanna go full savage, human corpses as well, mwahaha! (careful though, depending on certain circumstances, dead things might get up and walk around!)) can now be skinned to get hide, leaving behind a bony corpse. The skeleton can then be smashed apart with a blunt instrument to harvest bone.

Once you have a base item (like a wood club) and enough resources, it's time to scope out a forge!

Pay no mind to the buggy armor animation... shhh.

Above, you can see the required material to take the "Broken Arming Sword", and create a brand new "Bronze Arming Sword". ALSO - the tiny little box in the upper right? Fetishes (mind out of the gutter, you)!!

I've added a whole series of brand new fetishes (or, god carvings) to the game. Each one can be broken open on its own to produce a "1 up", used in crafting to apply a god specific effect to a piece of gear, and equipped to that green box in the HUD to level up and learn something cool! Some of these fetishes are extremely rare and difficult to find - others are unique to each playthrough and equally difficult to find... Picking up a fetish also increases your "FAVOR" stat. FAVOR makes finding items a bit easier, gives you a chance to pull of a critical strike on a tough enemy or boss, and a few other secret things ;)

Conversely, using a Fetish outright or for crafting breaks the carving and lowers your FAVOR - having low favor and using a Fetish could be hazardous to a barbarian's health and make combat... interesting - you know, incurring the wrath of the gods, and all.

AAaaand, speaking of combat:

New (and final) Player States/Shield Functionality

Shield bash at the right moment can parry an enemy's melee attack!

New shield states! A new shield bash mechanic has been added to replace the old half-arsed one. This new shield bash can break an enemy's guard, parry an enemy's melee strike or just generally smash a bad guy's face in (shields with spikes will do extra damage).

The shield can now also be raised above your head to defend against enemies coming at you from above, hazards, arrows, and all manner of nasty bits trying to rain death down on you.

This puts a cap on the player features (finally!) and brings the final player states to a total of 96!! ... Whew.