LAUNCH IS HERE FOLKS!

We are so excited to finally bring you chapters 1-3 of "The Wandering Wyrm", releasing tomorrow for just 90 cents!

We have been hard at week over independence day, through sickness all last week, and still trying to find some time to shoot off fireworks! Don't worry, I am unburnt, unbroken, and got plenty of fun in.

Anyways, enough of that, lets talk about some updates.

The new Intro

The old intro art was nice, but it was also very clearly AI generated and had some visual artifacts from that process that just did not look good. I decided to take a new direction and make the scenes based on various free use famous paintings and artworks - for instance, we have included this absolute banger:

- Directly based on Napoleon Crossing the Alps by Jacques-Louis David

I guess you'll just have to see the rest when you play! Please post what images you think we used to base them, and next week we will post a full attribution to all the wonderful, historic art we decided to use to base our intro off of.

Obviously, still AI art, but - I felt it allowed a bit of fun, and also, heightened the quality of the intro cutscene while remaining true to the story and worldbuilding.

Characters:

In addition, we have resized and redone a number of character portraits to reduce some visual artifacts and make the sizing of characters consistent, and got rid of / replaced some drunk portraits that were crazy.

• Here is Dwarf 4, resized and his new "Drunk" expressions we added!

• Also, Eve, resized with some visual nits fixed.

I also adjusted the tavern setting, in some cases the characters barely seemed to fit and were quite hard to click on - this has been updated and better indication is given when a character is selected.

We are still toying with various selection indicators - but I have decided to hide these experimental changes until I feel they are better/ready.

Dialogue:

We have also done a lot of work to polish up the dialogue and minorly reword some sections to better fit the feel/theme of the game. To be honest, this work is ongoing, and not quite done, but for chapters 1-3, I feel it is much better already.

I still plan to revisit the chapter 1-3 dialogue, but this will likely be part of the later work on chapter's 4-6. Not only will this keep it a little fresh for returning players/purchasers of chapters 1-3, but it will also give us better perspective on what actually should change.

In general, expect some cleaner dialogue, but it's not quite done yet.

One area we really haven't done justice in the time leading up to launch is the dialogues that occur outside the bar, both in the art and content. This is something we hope to fix up before the chapter 4-6 launch and continue the quality into it.

Going Forward:

I wanted to talk about cooking.

What we have now is a pretty solid base - it has a fully customized cooking system, a ton of rating changes, and overall, I feel pretty happy with where we are at...

However - you might have noticed that Doug gives you some slime in a certain dialogue path (if you impress him) - and this is not really reflected in your ingredients.

Down the line, we plan to expand the available ingredients you can get and the ways you acquire them, with some special ingredients only being available through certain actions you take in the story. Along with that, we plan to change the overall balance of the rating system to be much stricter on what certain characters will accept, and a smarter detection of exactly what you cooked/ gave them.

For now, it is pretty loose, what you can serve. For example, I am able to complete the game by using exclusively hard tack and boozing up customers to a good level where you can.

In the future, you can expect for this kind of service to garner a "Game Over" screen.

In fact, in the current state, it's actually quite hard to completely lose the game unless you fully pass out many customers and never serve decent food.

So, while I won't reveal all we have planned, we have a lot of changes "cooking" for how this system will change in the future - potentially with some more in depth cooking minigames, and certainly more ingredients, and more dishes.

Updates

• Lots of new drunk images for characters that did not have them yet

• added a small sound when selecting characters

• Verified all Achievements.

• Minor difficulty adjustment to merlin's madness

• Redid the opening/intro cutscene

• LOTS of new art for characters (still unused in some cases in dialogue - more updates to come)

• Updated various tooltip icons

• Updated some button disable colors

• Added a small sound when selecting NPC's to make it more noticable

• Slightly reduced the size of all tavern NPC's to fit them better

Bugfixes:

• Fixed various softlocks due to clicking certain buttons very rapidly

• Fixed a softlock in Flappy Dragon

• Lots of dialogue fixes and one issue with the final set of characters in chapter 3

• Fixed the positioning of all characters in the tavern

• lots of minor visual fixes related to the above

• drunk slider now hides when going to next character

• fixed an issue where a certain combination of dialogue + food could cause Caine to resurrect unintentionally

• similar issue where Caine would just not appear

• Fixed an issue with merlin's madness where you could literally never win.

• Fixed a dialogue issue where a character we had not yet used would show up for the final cutscene

• Fixed a few minor visual issues on character outlines

• Made it possible to beat the game by serving ONLY hardtack.

• Fixed an issue with the exit button in the tavern