After coming back from the field, I have been working on penance quests. Essentially, they're going to very strongly resemble the existing quests, except they won't have a reward. The "reward," granted in advance, will be a reduction in difficulty brought on by sinful shortcuts the player elects to take.
Priests will flash purple when you have sins to confess.
The point of penance quests and sin-based difficulty increases is to balance the short-term benefits of sinful behavior (stealing, cheating, behaving uncharitably, extortion, lying) which the player is tempted to do with long-term difficult consequences -- either increased difficulty or a new quest to perform as a penance.
I came into some unexpected downtime recently when I had a surgery (not to worry, nothing life-threatening), so I decided to take some time to learn Blender, something that I had been meaning to do. My mentor had been encouraging to do more with the secret 3D rendering since it's interesting, so I decided to go along with it.
An early render of stalactites.
Blender isn't exactly easy to use, but I was able to really improve my workflow with 3D models, and I'm happy I learned what I needed to know to work on things.
A town, in a 3D render.
Currently, I've added almost everything to make the game playable in the secret rendering, minus some of the rendering in Spires. I should get that done soon.
Picturesque.
A minor caveat: playable will not necessarily mean good-looking or even user-friendly. That will come with time. It will mean that you can see every item, mob, and obstacle.
The end result here is that you should be expecting an update this week. I'll wrap up some of the penance quest stuff tomorrow, and I'm thinking Thursday or Friday at the latest. Then it will be nearly time for the 0.3 update, and there will be a few changes coming down for that!