About a month ago we started working on a brand new zone in the world. The new zone is a dense forest filled with tons of hills, mountains, and a lot of hidden points of interest. We're still working on this as it is a rather large zone and we're really excited for you to explore it! The forest is somewhere we want you to get lost in and so we're working hard to put lots of paths, twists, turns, and secrets everywhere. 

This week we've also been working a lot on getting the UI setup and functioning for things like merchant mechanics, an in-game map, item rarities, dialogue, and things of that nature. A big part of Wild West and Wizards will be getting loot, buying from merchants, talking to NPCs, and so we wanted to make sure that is a clean and polished experience. 

In addition to UI work and world building, we've also started working on getting sound effects and music in! We've got a ton of new music for this game that we are excited about, and each town will have its own music as well. This week we also added a fun little discovery sound and a text pop up when discover a new point of interest! 

As always thanks for reading and we'd love to hear your feedback! 

As you may know, in Wild West and Wizards you will start in the desert and have much to explore there. We are working hard to really chock it full of cliffs, caves, and lots of points of interest so that it'll take some time to actually explore all the desert has to offer. That being said, we wanted some other zones for you to explore as well. If you follow the blog you probably saw the last couple weeks we spent a lot of time working on a new plains zone. Well in addition to that, we are also adding a forest zone! These areas really help to make the world a lot bigger, and also allow for unique visual and theme changes to keep exploration fresh and fun. 

The forest zone will be very dense and distance visibility will be limited unlike the plains and desert zone. We want you to really be able to get lost in the forest and have to search to find all the points of interest. We are still working on the zone and while all the zones have more to go as far as polish, it's coming along quite well. 

As we've said before we've also been working on getting all the systems needed in to go through the core gameplay loop. This week we've implemented various systems such as respawning, merchant mechanics, saving systems such as player location, and resting mechanics. We've also done a good bit of optimization work this week which tremendously helped performance. Good optimization is very important to us in this game and we want to make sure the player can travel a large open world without feeling bogged down in frames. 

Thanks for reading and as always we'd love to hear your feedback!