Since the last dev log, I've managed to fix quite a few things and make quite a bit of head way with the quest lines of the game.

Fixed is a slew of ridiculously pervasive and stubborn glitches including a strange dialogue balloon bug that has plauged me since near the beginning.

I've nearly finished rebuilding my Flyers and have successfully rebuilt, torn apart and rebuilt and have torn apart again, the bats as I wish to make a variety of them at differing sizes so I can have a flock of them moving about.

I recently rebuilt my NPCs and Flyer units such that they did not have a separate state machine but a synchronous one that my main object (npc or flyer respectively) would execute on its own terms (sic: _physics_process for this who know godot at all).

I've fleshed out some of the areas, and completed the routes into the first quest, although I've not as yet added a secret route out of the first quest.

The major quest areas are mostly finished, with a handful of both indoor and outdoor regions in need of finished terrain, and a population of fauna.

Fashioning puzzles is of course time consuming and not just for code but for coming up with the concept.

Performance is always a concern although the game runs 45 to 60 frames.

There's lots of spell effects still to fabricate although they're very templated, which I can say of many other facets of the game which of course makes generating content that much easier.

I've over hauled the weather system, using a global light with a single modulation for my background.

Throwables weren't a swappable, customizable form of gear before and are now.  Where knives and bombs were once the only throwables, now I can fashion alternative throwables like boomerangs, alchemists fire, holy water, and rodents.

The menus and journals are fixed up nicely, and I've finally got the save/load system working in complete.

The major things I need to do are sound effects production.  While AI sounds may exist, creating sounds is something I enjoy doing and consider myself decent at.  There are lots of free sources and ... well, Audacity *gestures broadly*

I removed the only destructible doorway from the game along with the bribery interaction behind it as I figured it better to cull it and make things consistent and on that note all locks are now pickable although I have yet to assign difficulties to the locks.

The lockpicking system is an on the fly generated 'tumbler' of 'pins' where you control the torsion bar with your right stick and the lockpick with the left stick and have to bind pins, while moving them up to their shear points.  Graphically it's very simply, using drawn lines to simulate the various facets but I think it plays well, challenging the players own skill instead of forcing the player to suffer dice rolls.  In my opinion there's nothing worse than watching a Grandmaster Lockpick break on a not Grandmaster Lock because of a bad dice roll.  Here you the player are master of your fate!  If you break pins by pushing the torsion bar too far because they're in bad shape, you'll know it's because of you.   Lock have a series of variables governing their generation although they're at the moment all random with no pre generated locks.  In fact, at the time of this writing, if you exit the lockpicking on a lock and begin lockpicking the same lock again, the system will generate a new arrangement of pins, shearline, etc.  The solve here is to hash down the map and object name, then when the player encounters it, save the generated locks configuration using that name to recall it on demand, or in short, save and load the thing.  I also have to ensure all the pins are rendered correctly as currently I'm not displaying the pins own shearlines, merely the shear targets to align them upon.

There is so much dialogue.  I wish I had picked something simpler to produce as my first sort of desktop release but when you have a story to tell I suppose.

I spent an entire evening writing the dialogue for a fisherman who sells you rope and while he's almost finished, that reminds me I have to produce the hud representation of the amount of rope you're carrying.

There are a few quests that are completed with their items, dialogues and journal entries written and ready for adventurers encounters.

All in all I'm really pleased with the progress I've been making although at times it can feel like I've made barely any progress at all; especially when I want to record a new demo of the game and think to myself, "I just need to make the bats a little better" and find myself neck deep in my Flyers main code hours later having refined much but not got x or y fixed yet.

New video inbound soon, and a releasable demo maybe in a month?  Crossed fingers.