Now throughout the world you can find scorpions wandering the wilds ready to attack! We believe that there's a good balance between exploration, combat, and quests. Adding in some creatures like scorpions help us achieve that balance. We don't want you to be overstimulated with constant outlaws and bandit camps, but we also don't want super long stretches of the world where you don't encounter enemies. Adding in scorpions helps us make this feel a bit more dynamic. You may be out in the wilderness exploring and instead of hitting yet another camp of outlaws, you might see a scorpion roaming around or be surprised by one shooting poison at you from the bushes. 

There are also multiple scorpion types and some of the rare ones, while more difficult, will offer good loot drops and therefore a reason to hunt for them. 

One of our main focuses with this game is to make sure there is a ton of content for you to experience. And as such we are always working on adding new quests. We have tried to strike a balance between quests you get from an NPC, and quests you find naturally while exploring. For example, you may enter a new town and discover there's been a murder and the sheriff wants you to investigate it and track down the killer. Or you may be exploring the wild and come across a graveyard with a rare ability scroll requiring you to complete a puzzle to unlock it. This balance between natural discoveries and quests found through NPCs is something we are always trying to refine but we feel like it's coming along well. 

This game at its core is about exploration, and of course, loot. Loot is very important in a game like this and so we're trying to constantly create new pieces of armor and weapons for you to find. Here's how the loot loop is working as of right now. Most bandit camps or bosses you find can drop a random piece of armor. Armor has different rarities, stats, and an item level that fit different playstyles. You'll find new armor pretty consistently and a lot of your time will be spent taking the armor that fits your playstyle to blacksmiths in order to upgrade its level and stats. 

Weapons and abilities however, are a bit more rare. When you find a new weapon or ability, it really means something. We want it to be exciting to get a new revolver or shotgun, and for it to be alongside you for a decent bit of the journey. That being said, we are adding a decent variety of weapons scattered throughout the world so be sure and explore every nook and cranny to collect them all. Different weapons will be like armor in that they have varying stats, but can also vary in ways such as reload speed, bullet spread, damage drop off, and things like that. 

In addition to the content mentioned above we've also been spending a lot of time balancing the game, fixing bugs, working on performance, and other under the hood tweaks to make the game polished and run well. This is still a work in progress as the world is very large and there's a lot to take into account when trying to polish and balance it. Overall it's coming along great though. 

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

When playtesting we realized our world is pretty big and we wanted a nice balance between having to walk places but also some fast travel systems to avoid frustration. We generally want to avoid the concept of being able to fast travel anywhere, as it kind of cheapens the exploration. But on the other end of that it can be frustrating to have to go way back to town to upgrade gear, buy supplies, turn in quests, and so forth. 

So we've designed two basic travel systems for the time being. The first are bindstones. Each town in the game (there are six) will have a bindstone. You can interact with it and bind yourself to that location. This means you can use a return-to-home spell and instantly travel back to the place you last binded too. This is helpful as a big part of the game is returning to towns to level up gear, spells, replenish your stock, and turn in quests. However, there are still large expanses of the world where there are no towns and so we wanted a way outside of bindstones to be able to travel quickly to certain areas. This is where teleport runes come in. 

You can now find teleport runes in some places in the world. These are different than bindstones in that you have to be at a teleport rune in order to travel to another. You also have to unlock them before you can travel them. Each town wizard will have one but there will also be a few spread throughout the world. We're keeping them far enough part so there's still a good bit of exploration required. And not all teleport runes are easy to find. This way they are more of a reward for exploration rather than a way to avoid it.

We are still eventually planning to add a train system that you can actually ride in real time, but we wanted travel runes and bindstones in the meantime to act as a way to travel long distances later in the game.

Every good rpg needs a character creation system and so we've also been working on a system to allow you to create multiple characters, pick your class, and name your character. While we will likely only have one class at early access launch, we will be adding many more later and so you're going to want to create multiple new characters to test out the new classes. Eventually we'd like to add a way to see and customize some visuals of your character as well.

Every game deserves good music and so we've been working hard to make sure this game has the right balance between environmental ambiance and music. Some of the systems we've implemented recently are exploration music, new town music, and combat music. We've also set up a custom system to handle boss music so you can really feel epic when taking on unique enemies. 

A huge part of our work over the past couple of weeks has been balancing the game. The max player level right now is level 20. Your armor, spells, and weapons can also be leveled. And on top of that there will be various levels of enemies. We've been working a lot to make sure the natural progression of the game feels balanced so you actually feel like you're getting more powerful, but not so much that early parts of the game aren't fun anymore. We feel like we're honing in on a good mix of difficulty and player progression but of course we look forward to getting feedback from the community and further updating this system in the future as needed.

In addition to the content mentioned above, we've also been working on our map system and new loot chests. The map system allows you to see what you've uncovered in each zone and gives you an idea of where points of interest are in the world. The new loot chests are different tiered chests that can drop high level gear depending on where you are in the world. As you adventure into higher level areas, the chances for higher level loot chests increase and as such, a chance at rare or even epic gear. 

Not only have we added new loot but we've also added a lot of fun new quests. This is an area we'll also be continually updating after early access launch. Right now our goal is to have a good base number of quests, puzzles, and things to discover, but we'll be expanding upon that a lot as we update the game. 

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