Review of the past week (Patreon)

Good evening,

It's Friday evening again. The work on 0.5.7.0 is now complete. Time to talk a little about it and also about the next steps.

Since it's already in the cover picture, let's start with Gavina first. When I was talking about the next steps earlier this month, I completely forgot that the scene for Gavina is more than overdue. So it has to come first, before I can work on Claire & Kate. This scene involves a little reworking of Gavina's model, but also the addition of a dream system. This is something I've wanted to add for a long time. Similar to the Emily&Marcus dream, this system will allow for scenes that are otherwise unavailable.
So if the story has progressed to the point where, for example, the scene with Imawyn in prison is no longer available, you can replay it if the MC is asleep somewhere. I will only do this for scenes that are no longer available and not for all scenes in general (so no gallery). The reason for this is that I think a gallery would do more harm to the game than good. Because then you wouldn't need to interact with the game world anymore, which would feel bad from my point of view. I will start working on it on Monday and hope to finish it as soon as possible.

Time to talk a little about 0.5.7.0:
Overall, I'm happy with the changes I was able to make. But of course, as I've already indicated, I could have gone on for a while longer. The deep forest map, for example, really needs an overhaul and the balancing also needed a bit more time. My own new playthrough only went as far as just after the bandit camp (this is of course because I had to play through all the variants). I will try to continue this playthrough in the coming weeks to further improve the balancing and also fix any issues I come across.

In the fixed version 0.5.7.0, I have now also restored Claire's original lifted animation from before the rework, this can be seen when you visit her at night (if you wake her up after she has already slept). I received many messages from people who preferred the old version to the new one. This way, both can coexist. I might change that in the future so that the old version of the scene becomes a dream scene, but we'll see about that. 

As for the MC dialog images: they were reworked again in 0.5.7.0, as many of you didn't like the changes I made before. I don't know if the new version is acceptable now. If not, I've also included a patch at the end of the release post to restore the old dialog images.
What I'm pretty happy about are the changes I made to the crafting system. Before it was random if an item got upgrade slots, now it depends on the crafting skill of the MC. Also crafting of armor and weapons now takes ingame time which is something that bothered me before. The crafting system wasn't meant to for such things, but with the changes I now made to it this is finally possible. Also weapons can finally be upgraded with both whetstones and gems and you can finally find tin in the world. (before the bronze bars were pretty much a one trick pony since you could exactly craft 1 bar of it).
So a lot of useful changes in this version and I might build up on some of the changes I made in this version in the future.

Right now though I feel a bit tired. Didn't sleep well last night (had too much to think about).
So now that 0.5.7.0 and the walkthrough update is finally done I will relax a bit until monday. Then it's time to continue with fresh energy.

I wish you all a nice weekend!