I am currently spending the majority of my time on implementing the world map systems. There is a plethora of things that I need to tick off but progress is steady. That said, I am still aiming to upload weekly builds, albeit they will be smaller for the time being.

- The "Body Attack" for swords now has its own unique combat animation.

- The "Body Attack" for axes now has its own unique combat animation.

- The "Body Attack" for maces now has its own unique combat animation.

- The "Body Attack" for greatswords now has its own unique combat animation.

- The "Body Attack" for warhammers now has its own unique combat animation.

- The "Body Attack" for greataxes now has its own unique combat animation.

- The bug in the battle loot UI, where pressing "all" will take all items instead of showing all item types has been fixed. The "take all" button still remains at the bottom, previously pressing either of these buttons would transfer all loot which was not intended.

- The issue of having multiple portraits highlighted when swapping between specific menus like vault, arena and temple has been fixed. From now on the last portrait that was highlighted will be used when swapping between vault, arena and temple menus.

Build 5 continues to expand upon the newly implemented "perks system". In total, there are now just under 300 individual perks (including weapon abilities) which are derived from the 10 "perk type effects". Internally, I classify "perk type effects" as something that is unique from a coding perspective, IE a perk to gain +5 Strength and a perk to gain +5 Focus belong to the same perk type effect but they are still two individual perks that both cost one PP each to acquire. I just wanted to clarify this as I still have more plans for the perks system. For now however, I would like to just gather feedback on it and tweak things based on community feedback as opposed to adding more perks.

The perks system has also revamped character progression tying it closer to the perks system and each warrior now has the ability to bring up to two weapon sets into combat provided they have the correct perks. So yes, weapon swapping is in and it will no doubt give the player more options in combat.

Again this build is being uploaded to the experimental branch first, so I'd appreciate it if you guys played it and offered me some feedback. The main reason why I have opted to created two branches is to allow players to finish their older playthroughs before transitioning to the new perks system builds. In a couple weeks I will most likely be making these builds live.

Instructions to opt into the beta/experimental branch:

1. Within the Steam library list, right click 'Dead Monarchy", then select "Properties".
2. Towards the top of the window that pops up, click the "Betas" tab.
3. A dropdown menu list will then appear, select "experimental - Experimental branch".
4. The game should then automatically download and update to this build.
5. Once you have booted up the game, if you see "Build 4" in the main menu, then you are good to go.

- Added new combat idle animation for rapier.

- Added new combat idle animation for 2H greatsword.

- Added new combat idle animation for 2H warhammer.



- All melee abilities (unless not applicable) now have perks to allow for attacking on higher elevation.

- All melee abilities now have perks to reduce their Stamina/Focus use cost.

- All melee abilities (unless not applicable) now have perks to reduce their cooldown timers.

- All melee abilities (unless not applicable) now have perks to reduce their AP cost.

- There is now a set of perks that will increase the chance of gaining +1 for a specific stat on level up. There are 5 tiers, each tier adds +20%. So for example, +20% to gain +1 Strength, +40% to gain +1 Strength, +60% to gain +1 Strength, +80% to gain +1 Strength, +100% to gain +1 Strength. On a side note, not all perks will have tiers, some perks will be individual perks that have no other "upgraded versions".

- There is now a series of perks that can increase each primary stat in increments of +5 up to +25. These perks are found in the "Progression Perks" tab.

- There is now also a set of perks that will reduce the hit chance penalty that is applied when targeting the head. It is found in the "General Perks" tree. The highest tier perk is applied by default to all monsters/enemies.

- There are a series of "Reflection" perks, one for each primary stat. You gain half your combat level as a bonus to X primary stat. The changes are not retroactive, so it is important to decide when you want to take the perk. Waiting and taking this perk at a higher level does mean a bigger stat boost. These perks are found in the "Progression Perks" tree.

- Each character can now bring up to two sets of weapons into combat. For example Sword + Shield and Crossbow. When you swap weapons in combat, you do not receive the full bonus to primary stats that you would normally get if you equipped the weapon. For example you equip a Mace that gives +2 Stamina, you'll start combat with that bonus but if you swap to an Axe that gives +2 Resolve, your maximum Resolve will be increased by +2 but you will not gain the full amount. This is both a way to balance weapon swapping so that there is still a valid reason to just specialize in just one weapon but it is also necessary due to how the extra stat bonuses themselves are applied.



- A series of perks have been implemented for "weapon swapping". It is basically an ability that goes on your shortcut bar. By default, it costs 12 AP and you can eventually reduce it down to 0 AP.

- The implementation of all these new perks has resulted in a few abilities getting their cooldown timer, use cost and AP cost adjusted, this would be in the case of an ability that has yet to be improved by perks.

- Stat progression has been changed. At Veteran and Monarch difficulty, characters now only gain +1 in the two stats they are proficient in based on their backgrounds. At lower difficulties, characters gain +2 in their proficient stats. Characters no longer gain levels in stats that they are not proficient in. This then paves the way for stat boosting perks.

- Each warrior can now only acquire 6 active abilities from the perks tree.

- Attacking the "Head" with either Attack/Shoot Head or Break Helmet now has a -50% hit chance penalty. In other words, the bonus +50 that used to be added (hit chance formula) is now only added to attacks that target the body or weapon abilities. This only applies to basic attacks to the head, it does not affect abilities.

- "Fatigued" now applies when you have less than 5 Stamina (0-4) as opposed to 0 Stamina.

- All tiers of longbow weapons now only do +10 Break damage to Helmet/Armor values.

- Updated difficulty selection menu to reflect the changes to stat gains. Also increased the texture resolution of the choice buttons as they were starting to blur at larger resolutions.



- Fixed the issue of equipped weapon types not displaying properly in the "arena menu" and instead just showing up as "unarmed" despite having a weapon equipped.

- Due to the fact that I have added difficulty levels in now, you can now specify a specific amount within a stack to sell.

- Changed all references of the "claymore" weapon type to "greatsword".

- Changed all references of the "halberd" weapon type to "polearm".

- Changed all references of the "hatchet" weapon type to "axe".

- Changed all references of "rusty" weapons to "basic" weapons, as something like a "Rusty Longbow" doesn't really make sense.

- Added in a confirmation message when exiting the game with manual loading/saving enabled.

- Arena UI has been further updated. There is a UI element in the bottom left corner that displays all the perks acquired on the currently selected warrior, this should make it easy to keep track of what each warrior has. There are now also two UI elements that display the equipped weapons from both set 1 and set 2 since you can now swap between two weapon sets. Tweaked minor UI element positions.

- The camp, barracks and battle placement UI have been updated to support the additional slots for weapon swapping (second set). The UI boxes for barracks and battle placement have scroll bars, whereas the camp UI box is just a static box. "Empty" slots have been made more clearer as well.

- For players that toggle their battle camera off "V", there used to be an issue where when you come back into a battle after previously toggling the camera off you had to press "V" twice. The issue has to do with how the camera is tracked. So now, after every battle the camera is automatically toggled back on. So basically, you just have to press "V" once to toggle it back off, but the end result is smoother as previously the UI elements were not correctly displaying whether the camera was actually toggled on and off after coming back into a battle.

- The dismiss button in the barracks menu will now automatically be highlighted when the mouse hovers over it. This should give the player more "feedback" when interacting with the UI.

- A tooltip for the dismiss button (in the barracks menu) has been added, this should help clarify what the button does.

- Tooltips for "items" have been updated. They now show the icon and the amount of the specific item that you are hovering over. This is only for "items" specifically, so not weapons or armor etc.

- Added a tooltip description for when hovering over EXP or Experience Points in any related menu.

- Tooltips in general now scale to the size of the text box. This basically means that tooltips will conform to the size of the text and won't take up unnecessary space on the screen.

- New icons have been added to all weapon related perk trees. For example, there shouldn't be any more duplicate icons in the crossbow and longbow perk trees that were added in the previous build.

- All weapon abilities have "ability" added after the ability name to distinguish that it is an active ability when interacting with the perks tree. Any "passive perk" that directly augments abilities is labelled as a perk within the tooltip description. Instead of +1, +2, +3, +4 to denote a perk that augments an ability, the words "Improved, Refined, Advanced and Perfected" are used instead. For example, Snap Shot +1 is now Improved Snap Shot. In cases where there are a series of 5 related passive perks, the first perk in the chain is called "Flawed xxx".



- The initial loading sequence when first booting up the game has been shortened.

- You can now rotate the camera while you are in town. This is just a nice little touch that gives the town a bit more perspective, taking away the feeling that you are looking at a flat image.

- Updated the text size and font of UI drag icons (ie x5, x10) when dragging and dropping items in various menus.

- Adjusted existing combat idle animation for 2H greataxe.

- Most instances of "feet sliding around" during combat animations should have been fixed.

- Tweaked some of the lighting settings for the player town/base.

- "Suicidal Vampire Archers" bug, should be fixed now. Vampire Archers will now only use this ability if they have at least 26 Strength, if they have anything less the ability will fail and they will default to basic attack AI.

- A rare issue where the hit chance UI box doesn't show up when swapping between abilities over a target you are currently hovering the mouse over, has been fixed.

- The issue of being able to initiate certain unwanted actions with the "right mouse button" should have been fixed. For example, closing a menu screen with the right mouse button or selecting an ability then initiating the ability/attack on a target with the right mouse button.

Again, I'd like to thank everyone for your support and most importantly your patience. After over a month of no updates (I was low-key stressing about this actually) I feel like things are back to normal now and I should be able to upload weekly builds again. The plan is to let the perks system "simmer" for a bit, there is still a lot more I want to add to it but I will now be switching my focus to the WORLD MAP. That's right you read correctly, I hadn't planned on starting on the world map until next year but I'm in a good position now to begin work on it.

Overall, the map is somewhat inspired by Fallout 1/2, with the grid overlay and real-time map movement. The map is comprised of individual 2D tiles which will give me finer control over things like random events. The player model and buildings are all 3D models but the camera will be fixed. While the bulk of my attention will be on the world map, I will also be releasing smaller weekly builds mainly based on any feedback I get on the new perks.



So there is still a lot more to look forward to in the future, so perhaps tell a friend about it! As always, I'd really appreciate any feedback you guys have, especially reviews as they do wonders and help motivate me!

Cheers,
Kevin.

Hey guys,

So things may seem quiet on the forums and last week I missed my weekly update, but things haven't slowed down at all. I mentioned in the "Upcoming Builds" thread that Build 5 was delayed and so I'll elaborate a bit more on that in this post.

Basically Unity, the engine I am developing on has 3 tiers a developer can develop on, "Personal", "Plus" and "Pro". If you subscribe to "Pro" along with all the added benefits, after your 2 year commitment, you can elect a version of Unity released within your subscription period and that version you own, does not require further subscriptions, you also still retain your unlimited revenue cap. "Personal" and "Plus" still have revenue caps. There was a few other issues that made me hesitant to develop on the free version temporarily when my subscribed version expired and that was basically compatibility issues going forward when my license was sorted out and I make the switch back. So basically I lost a few days as I waited to get confirmation on the differences between the versions.

Until this gets sorted, I can't export any new builds to upload, however development will continue as usual. If my update schedule was more sporadic then this wouldn't really even be an issue but I prefer weekly builds. I am already in contact with a representative and hopefully it'll be sorted out in a week or two at the latest.

For the actual details on Build 5, you can visit the thread but I'll summarize the major points so far.

1. Basic perks that improve abilities for all melee weapons have been implemented. It is a series of perks that are available for all melee abilities.

2. A series of perks that increase the chance of you gaining +1 in a specific primary stat by +20%, +40%, +60%, +80%, +100%. You no longer gain any stat gains in stats that your background is not proficient in. In Veteran and Monarch difficulties you gain +1 in proficient stats, in easier difficulties you gain +2.

3. Similar to #2, a series of perks that increase a primary stat in increments of +5 up to +25. These two "perk type effects" will give the player more direct control over their stat progression.

Including abilities, Build 5 will have 275 individual "perks", at least so far at this time of writing. That seems like a lot, but this is where I'll clarify things. These perks are derived from "perk type effects" that I have internally identified. I didn't intentionally try to bloat the numbers either, I just made it this way because I wanted more specialization. IE instead of one perk that decreases AP cost across all abilities of a specific weapon type, I made 5 perks that decreased AP cost for each ability. Not all perks will have several variations of it either, some perks will just be standalone effects. All in all though, it would have been easier for me to just implement one perk that decreased the AP cost of all weapon type abilities, but I wasn't satisfied with it. This was extremely time consuming as everything I had to do, I had to do 4 times over again. That said, I think it was worth it.

All the perks so far can be sorted into these perk type effects:

1. A perk that increases the chance of gaining +1 in a primary stat.
2. A perk that increases a primary stat by X.
3. A perk that decreases the AP cost of a melee ability.
4. A perk that decreases the Use Cost of a melee ability, IE Stamina.
5. A perk that decreases the cooldown period of a melee ability.
6. A perk that increases the ability range of a ranged ability.
7. A perk that increases the Use Count of a ranged ability, IE x1, x5.

However, the biggest thing I am working on is "weapons switching". This by itself is a huge feature and one that I honestly didn't think would even make it in. It affects a lot of systems but so far, the results are good.

Essentially each warrior has slots for a primary weapon + shield then a secondary weapon + shield, 4 slots in total. Bigger weapons would occupy two slots, so you could go into battle with a greatsword and a greataxe, or longbow and a sword + shield. This then of course opens a whole new world of opportunities for combining abilities within a single warrior. The switching itself will be done with an active ability, so again the player makes a conscious decision to create a hybrid build at the expense of perk points, ability slots and specialization of a specific weapon type.

I haven't done much testing of the abilities themselves because as you know I'm just one developer. However, I am very excited to get this into your hands. That said, Build 5 will still only be uploaded to the "experimental branch" rather than the main live build branch.

On top of all of that, I want to start working on the world map by the start of next month. So the rest of this month will be dedicated to the perks system, it doesn't mean it is finished though, but there should be enough to experiment on and to gather feedback on. With the implementation of weapon switching, it opens up more incentives to mix things up as prior to this, you had limited decisions to make when spending perk points.

So if all goes well, by September I will start to focus on the world map, but I will still be paying attention to your feedback on the perks system. Going forward then, I will alternate between both the perks system and the world map.

That's about it for now. As always, thanks again for all the support from the community. It is nice to see that the community is still growing and thanks again to those that have left reviews!

Cheers,
Kevin.

- Cooldowns for abilities are now displayed properly in ability tooltips.

- The use limits/charges of ranged abilities now show up in tooltips prior to acquiring the ability from the perks tree as opposed to only appearing when you have acquired the ability.

- Active abilities are now marked properly as "Active Abilities" in ability tooltips when viewing them within the perks tree.

- The cooldown UI fix is now also applied to abilities that you view on the shortcut bar during combat. So cooldowns will now show up properly in tooltips.

- Perks that improve active abilities are now marked properly as "Passive Perks" in ability tooltips.

Each character can gain up to 50 perk points, between level 1-50. Each perk/ability will cost 1 perk point. Each character can only select up to 6 active abilities (not implemented yet). I also plan to introduce global perk points for extremely OP perks. This means you can only have a certain amount of characters with that OP perk.

In the future, EXP will be updated again to make it so that levels past 50 are extremely hard to get, overall levels will be adjusted too, IE monster and equipment requirements. The idea is that anything above 50 is "veteran/champion" levels.

Progression within the perk trees is both vertical and horizontal. All weapon abilities have been transferred over to the perk trees. Most of the work is centered around longbow and crossbow in this update. The abilities are sorted into a column with each ability requiring a minimum level requirement. So the further you progress down the tree, the higher the level requirements will be. Future perks will do more specific things but for now, only the most basic perks have been added to longbow/crossbow sections.



As you can see from the image above, the root abilities all start on the furthermost left side. When you progress horizontally, there is no level requirements. The only prerequisite is the perk that came before it. For now only two "perk effect types" have been added. Perks that increase ability range and use count/charges and this only applies to ranged abilities.



As you progress horizontally as shown in the image above, you will gradually improve the ability. In the case of crossbow/longbows you are increasing the amount of times you can use the ability and the range of that ability.

So for example, if you are using a longbow and you want to acquire the infamous "Snap Shot" ability, then you need to be at least level 20. When you first get it, it will have a range of 4 and you can only use it once. As you upgrade it, you can upgrade the range to 6 and acquire 5 uses. So that means if you really want to, you can burst DPS and use all x5 Snap Shot uses in one turn. To get to that point, you would need to have 5 perk points and to be at least level 20.

To obtain the power of ranged combatants prior to Build 4, you would basically have to expend 25 perk points. Of course the beauty of it, is you can pick and choose your abilities now. There will also be perks that do more interesting things, for now I am just doing the most basic ones.


- Two "perk effect types" have been introduced. Those two effect types total up to 50 perks if you include the base abilities that have been reworked into the perk tree itself. For now I will focus on the basic ones. The main goal of this build is to balance ranged combat and to transfer the "raw power" over into the perks tree.



- Swords now have a new combat idle animation.

- Maces now have a new combat idle animation.

- Hatchets now have a new combat idle animation.


- New parameter for Veteran and Monarch difficulties. On Veteran you still gain x2 EXP but bonus EXP is also rewarded to the warrior that lands the killing blow.

- Similar to Veteran, Monarch difficulty rewards EXP to the warrior that lands the killing blow but that is now the ONLY way to gain EXP. So a warrior that doesn't land the killing blow, won't get any EXP. (Highly experimental, Monarch is a difficulty setting used for measuring perks.)

- On Monarch difficultly, the Monarchs or "biome bosses" will have less restrictions. They can now spawn right away but still cannot spawn in level 1 missions or when a party has 3 or less warriors.

- Ranged weapon abilities no longer have cooldowns but have a limited amount of uses. The amount of uses for each ability can be upgraded in the perk tree. Ranged weapon abilities now have a base range of 4 tiles and can be increased through perks.


- "Loot all" button has been implemented into the battle loot UI as requested by the community.

- All weapon abilities have been transferred to the perk trees. Equipping a weapon now only gives you the basic attacks. (Attack Body/Head, Break Helmet/Armor.)


- Fixed the issue of not being able to rotate or individually end a warrior's turn when unarmed. Doesn't really change anything since in most cases you wouldn't be unarmed anyway, but another bug squashed nonetheless.


With Build 3.1 released, I feel the game has become quite stable now. There has been no reports of crashes and the major FPS issues have been fixed. So now, I will turn my attention towards working on the major features.

As mentioned, I will continue working on the perks system. I need to create basic perks for melee abilities. These basic perks would be different to ranged ability perks. No doubt things will become unbalanced again but as you know, I am more than willing to work with the community.

Aside from direct development on the game, I am still working with the freelance animator and modeler. Things are still progressing slowly with the freelance modeler, we are still in the concept phase for the weapon models. I have also been spending a little bit of time on putting together a few more armor sets. There is still a lot more work that needs to be done before these sets are "game ready" but I thought I'd drop a teaser.



The community has nearly hit 1.5k members, so thanks again to everyone for their continued support! It would mean a lot if you guys could leave a review as it really does help motivate me. ːsteamhappyː

Cheers,
Kevin.

- Cultural armor no longer drops in level 1 missions. (Please report any cases if it does.)

- There are now 5 levels of difficulty in Dead Monarchy. For now they only alter EXP rate, the price of buying new warriors and starting gold. The current difficulty of the game prior to Build 3.1 is set to "Soldier". "Veteran" is what the game was when it first launched. "Monarch" is only recommended for people who are looking for more punishment. Existing save files will default to the "Soldier" difficulty. The only way to select difficulty is when you start a new game. Difficulty levels below:

- Peasant: EXP x5, warriors at 50 crowns x LVL, 5000 crowns start.
- Brigand: EXP x4, warriors at 100 crowns x LVL, 2500 crowns start.
- Soldier: EXP x3, warriors at 200 crowns x LVL, 1500 crowns start.
- Veteran: EXP x2, warriors at 500 crowns x LVL, 500 crowns start.
- Monarch: EXP x1, warriors at 1000 crowns x LVL, 250 crowns start.


- You can now dismiss warriors from the "Barracks" building. Click the "X" button in the top right hand corner within the name box GUI to remove them from the party. You cannot dismiss a warrior if it is your last warrior. Warriors will take their equipment when you dismiss them, so you should confiscate all their equipment before you fire them, they won't give you the clothes on their back though.

- Crafting materials for equipment, resources for upgrading buildings and gems that you sell on the marketplace have all been split into three separate categories. Minerals, lumber and gems. This should make managing the inventory easier.

- I have improved item sorting in both inventory and marketplace menus. By default, items will be sorted better into groups. For example, all your tier 1 weapons will be grouped together and all your tier 2 weapons will be grouped together. They will appear that way by default and will auto sort when the inventory is affected, IE from selling/buying or swapping out weapons. It will also make filtering items easier, like when you filter by weapons, all your weapons are sorted based on their tiers.

- Renamed the crafting materials to something more memorable. These are the materials used to craft weapons and armor. (Iron, Steel, Silver, Electrum, Obsidian, Orichalcum, Mithril, Moonstone, Meteorite, Adamantine.)

- Updated mission briefing pages to reflect the changes to material names and cultural armor drops.

- Reordered the sequence of options when starting a new game. The difficulty menu, ironman option and then it displays the starting message.

- Updated the tooltip for "Condition" to mention that you can restore it in the "Temple" building.


- Fixed the issue where sometimes when a unit dies, the LOS is not updated immediately. For example, say you have two enemies, one enemy is on an adjacent diagonal tile to the first enemy. You have a melee and ranged, the melee kills one enemy, the second enemy that is diagonal to the first one will not be able to be targeted by ranged immediately, it takes about a second to update. This may cause confusion like being able to activate abilities that are not active by clicking but you can activate with the shortcut keys. The real reason is just because there was a slight delay before LOS was updated again, but that issue should be fixed now.

- Fixed the issue with markers not being removed when a unit dies. If you play with extended highlights on, it is basically the issue where when you kill an enemy the red box is not deleted and so you'll eventually have red boxes littering the map.

- FPS has been improved in the vault and marketplace menus. Larger inventories should no longer drop FPS as much. You will still notice drops every now and then but FPS will eventually build back up. FPS drops more when you are scrolling through larger quantities of items. I still recommend viewing items with filters. The issue of FPS slowing to a crawl while in vault/marketplace menus when coming back from a mission has also been resolved. Overall FPS should be much better, there is not much else that can be done until I upgrade the entire UI system to the newer Unity UI system.

Hey guys,

Neyreyan has decided to do a Let's Play series on Dead Monarchy after his first look video when it first launched. He was so eager to get his hands on it, that he bought the game before I could even send him a key! ːsteamhappyː

Thanks again for helping spread the word!

Link to playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLq7wBqfieZx84mu41yVP8JtEDMebWv-Oi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=On3__JJhyio&list=PLq7wBqfieZx84mu41yVP8JtEDMebWv-Oi&index=2&t=24s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlbgP4QayNQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFoYejUBBIo&t=11s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0T6le6_6tME

Cheers,
Kevin.

- A new building has been implemented and is called the "blacksmith". This is where you handle all your repairs and you can also break crafting materials down into lower tiers or convert up to a higher tier, conversion is always at a loss. Further upgrades to this building increases the amount of "orders" that you can spend on smelting and repairing. It functions similar to the temple. The "charge" mechanic has been put in place to prevent the player from snowballing too early and to also encourage the player to think economically.


- The functionality of the "temple" building has been split and part of it has been rolled into a new building called the "blacksmith". The temple now only restores Strength and Condition instead of also repairing armor. The values at which Strength and Condition are restored at and their prices have been slightly adjusted. You now have options to heal Condition by 1-5 or 10.

- The player will now gain perk points up to level 50. The player will not gain any more perk points above level 50. Numerous "under the hood" things have also been implemented in preparation for the perks system. The perk points themselves currently do nothing.

- The player now always starts with 1500 crowns (gold) whenever starting a new game.

- The player will now always begin with 3 warriors. The player will also begin with 3x +10 Attack Rings. The starting party size is fixed to 3.


-Manual loading/saving is mostly implemented and working now. If you want to play on your existing autosave file (ironman run) then I suggest you make a backup copy just in case.

- Ironman Mode is now an option and the player is prompted with whether or not they want to start an ironman run during the start of a new game. There can only ever be 1 active ironman save slot. If you start a new game and select yes, you override that current ironman slot, if you select no then you revert to manual loading/saving with no autosaving at all.

- You can now delete save slots by hovering the mouse cursor over the save file you want to delete then pressing the "Delete" key.

- The material icons for crafting/upgrading buildings that are displayed at the bottom of the UI when in town have been made slightly larger.

- Regarding the "temple" building, the term "charges" has been replaced with "favors". In terms of gameplay, nothing has changed. Temple description has also been updated to reflect the new changes.

- The new "blacksmith" building uses the old "camp" icon (where you click to bring up different buildings), which was the icon that looked like a fire. This new building has replaced the "menagerie".

- The "camp" building now uses a new icon which roughly looks like the outline of a person. It is still in the same position on the HUD though.

- Tutorial has been updated to reflect the new changes to the "temple" and the "blacksmith".

- New sound effects have been added when healing in the temple or repairing/smelting in the blacksmith.

- The image associated to the "workshop" building (you see it when you upgrade the building) has been updated with a new image and the old image is now used by the "blacksmith" building.

- "Arena" building UI has had some changes in preparation for the upcoming perks system. Any UI element referring to "skills" has been changed to "perks". New (empty) perk categories have also been added to the UI.


- Fixed an issue where a warrior over level 50 would occasionally appear for hire.

Hey guys,

Just wanted to let you all know that the Colonel himself has decided to take a dive and has tried out the latest build. Check it out if you guys wanted another opinion. ːsteamhappyː

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VvFiWjDATI

Cheers,
Kevin.

Hey guys,

So it has been just over 2 weeks since Dead Monarchy launched into early access and so I thought it would be nice to talk about what the near future holds. First though, I'd like to thank the community again for their overwhelming support. I knew sales were not going to be off the charts so I kept my expectations in check but what I never really anticipated was the amazing support and patience from the community.

One of the biggest motivations I have is the community, the feedback and support I get from you guys really helps fuel my passion and in turn improves the overall game. Also, thank you to everyone who has left a review, whether it is positive or negative, it all amounts to feedback that I process. If you guys haven't left a review yet, when you find the time it would be great if you could write one up!

So let's talk about my current plans. Currently I am working with a freelance modeler to get custom weapon models into the game and a freelance animator to get custom animations in. While these things may not be the biggest priorities, the reality is that freelancers come and go so I need to work to their schedule.

At the same time, I am still developing the actual game and I am really trying hard to upload weekly builds. I think by next week, both the freelancers will be on track so I can then direct more time back to actual development.

What I really want to push for is the perks system. If you read the Upcoming Features thread, you would have noticed that I said 3-6 months. That is me being super realistic but I would like to push a bit harder and try to get it in earlier.

I think the plan will be to break up the perks system into smaller updates, gradually introducing the perks in waves. The first few builds may "unbalance" the game giving too much power to the player but in time it will be tweaked based on feedback. I feel that the sooner I get it into your hands the faster the actual development will be. Rather than me testing the same perks for several months on my own, I'd rather quickly identify all the flaws and make improvements on them.

I really am not making any promises, but if all goes well, I could be done with the initial perks system in 3 months. At that point, I would like to let it "stew" for a bit and start work on the world map. As crazy as it sounds, there is a chance that the initial world map could make it in by the end of this year. That is, if I release a rough version, enough to give the community an idea of how it would work. The world map build would probably be released into a beta branch though.

Then come next year, I will be alternating between both the perks system and the world map. Small elements from the other points I listed in the Upcoming Features thread would probably start to bleed over too.

This is all based on whether or not things go to plan, if not then it would fall back to the timeframes I specified previously. So with all that said, I am hoping we can continue to work together! ːsteamhappyː