This time, I've added a new skill. It was originally designed for the wolf... and for a whole pack of wolves - which I'll talk about in a bit.

The skill itself is pretty straightforward... it's a melee ability. You can see how it works on screen. Right now it's level one, so it's fairly modest... but of course, it'll be upgradeable later on.

I also reworked the skill highlighting. Now it looks more natural... and closer to what I originally had in mind. I've added the first event as well. It's inspired by the old Little Red Riding Hood tale - there are many interpretations of it, so I decided to create my own. The quest has several endings: you can let the wolf eat only the girl... and leave the main character alone, or instead - he can eat only the main character, or you can fight the wolf right away. After defeating him, Red Riding Hood appears as an NPC - you can question her, and she'll explain how she ended up there... or say nothing at all, and you can simply send her away. As a reward, she gives you one of the quest items that you can use later.

I've also added the first encounter with wolves. There are several of them, and they attack like in real life - from all sides, as a pack. They're not very strong individually... each has just one energy... but there are many of them.

Here I ran into a technical issue: their npcs logic was being calculated every frame... meaning at 360 FPS, it was running 360 times per second. I changed that approach and settled on calculating it 10 times per second... and for packs, even 6 is enough. So now there's an additional variable that defines how often an NPC "thinks." I'll be using this everywhere - increasing it in critical moments, or lowering it when needed. For now, 5-10 times per second seems optimal... it's enough for active combat and keeps performance solid.

I also did some general code cleanup - small improvements here and there... which resulted in a noticeable optimization boost overall.

I've made some updates to the map as well: added more collisions, gradually returning sprites to their proper places, and assigning aspects to them.