Hi everyone!
I just want to let you know that I'm working on some more major updates and therefore there will be less frequent updates in the near future. But now, let's talk about the plans for the next months and what needs to be done in order to implement them:
Animations
I have to confess, I procrastinated that part, simply because I had no one who could create animations - now that I have someone, they will be added soon.
Armor, weapons & hang gliders
These are things I can probably add in a short period of time. I need to improve the inventory for that and I want to add multiple bags slots, so you can craft or otherwise obtain bags for storing more items. I also need to add a way to first obtain different weapons (basically what a class selection would be in other games), for which I want to use kind of tutorial quests, which will replace the text tutorial with a little bit more interactive tutorial. With the different weapons will also come more abilities and a way to reorder them in the ability bar.
Enemy abilities
The enemies in the game currently only have an auto-attack. I want them to have different abilities, like ice creatures that unleash a blast of icy water or wind elementals that create little tornadoes that you have to avoid for obvious reasons (they hurt). I'm not sure when I'll find the time for that.
Quests
I have a lot of ideas for quests, but unfortunately, all of them require some other things to be implemented first. For example, I have ideas for quests that send you to lunar planets to gather Mithril ore and learn new recipes for Mithril armor from the blacksmith who sent you there.
I also want to have a quest line in the mushroom biome on the luminous planets, where you have some guards that got sick and you have to kill glowing dragon flies for their wings that have healing powers. With those, you can heal the guards and one of them tells you that an evil alchemist made them sick, so you have the quest to kill him.
In the snowy regions, there can be aggressive snowmen that drop magical snow (or something else) which starts a quest that sends you to a village to find someone who knows something about that snow. In the end, it leads to a dungeon with an evil ice witch who turned the villagers into snowmen.
Those are only a few ideas, but they all require villages or at least houses to make some kind of sense - and for that, I have to work on the structure editor, which I haven't gotten to yet.
The luminous planet
The luminous planet has most of the textures, but it needs some NPCs. Additional to those NPCs that our graphics designer can create, I need to improve the AI of the enemies so they not only find a path to the player but also can fly at a kind of constant height above the ground, which is useful for enemies like giant dragon flies.
Dungeons
On the technical side, the features mentioned above, especially villages, basically form the base for dungeons. I only need to add a way to have multiple instances of the world, but that's not a big challenge. And of course I need to add some mechanics for the bosses.
And now, regarding the system requirements...
System requirements
I just tested the game on a second PC with different graphics cards and adjusted the minimum and recommended system requirements accordingly. My test system is an old Core 2 Quad Q9650 and a GTX 560 Ti and it worked in 1080p with 30 FPS at minimum settings. I can see a lot of room for improvement in disabling some of the post-processing effects like ambient occlusion etc., but unfortunately, this requires a lot of work and I simply don't have the time for it at the moment.
As you can see, there is a lot of work ahead and I'm trying to add those things as fast as possible, but I can't do more than work on this all day, so I have to ask for patience. I hope you can understand that.
If you read this far, you probably like the game, so I'd like to ask you to share it with your friends/followers. It always helps to have more people who play the game and give feedback.
May the stars shine brightly upon you!