Just a small upgrade today. This is what I got done the past days:

1. Death Penalty

When your whole party gets wiped out, you will be teleported back to town and revived with 1 HP. There is no Game Over in this game. But you lose 50% of your gold as Death Penalty. Now there are two tricks: A. You can purchase a "Money Pouch" that will reduce that Penalty to 40% and there is a Magic Pouch as well that you can find in one of the dungeons, this will reduce the cost down to 30%

Second, there are various Jewels in the game. Those are worth a lot of money and can both be found and bought. When your party dies, you lose gold but not those Jewels. So the Jewels can be used in order to preserve your money. Not a big deal, but it might become handy at some point.

2. Technical / Graphical Updates

2.1 Textures

I reduced the texture size down to 256x256 at 128 colors. Below is a picture attached. Do you see a difference? I do not. Its much faster now and takes less disk space and RAM.

2.2 Player Sprites

Instead of Faces each Actor is represented by a typical Actor sprite. Im using the Time Fantasy sprites here, as they perfectly fit that retro fantasy setting. I want to use Actors instead of Faces because in this first person game you will never see your actual party. Having sprites adds at least a bit of personality to them instead of having faces all the time (and they can be animated). It also looks better during combat, as combat takes places on the same screen/perspective.

2.3 HUD

Im redesigning the HUD a little bit. increased the transparency of the windows so that you can see the floor shining through. I might also change the black background color to something else to make it lighter and more lively.

Im still thinking about switching to good old brownish parchment style for the HUD, don't know...

2.4 NPCs

I'll be using a old face-set from the RPGMaker Advance as NPC faces (screens follow later), as they look really nice and retro. Now the NPCs use faces and the Actors sprites - that makes them look different altogether and thats exactly what I would like to achieve.

2.5 Monsters & Icons

Got both the Monsters and Icons for the game as well. TBA in a future blog post. By adding several new scripts (like Battle Line EX from Soulpour777) the combat now looks really nice!

Still looking for a nice and freely available set of fantasy music though!