Or at least, it was hot today. 95 goddamn degrees or something.

I have a very limited amount of time to dedicate to RM. Basically just Tuesdays, honestly, although I'm trying to be religious about those.

Here's today's updates.

* Making this game seems to be 90% testing this game.
* I added enemies, minerals, carts, and teleport events to B1, the second floor of Northstar mine.
* Most of my time spent testing and tweaking battle difficulty (this time a straight light armor/archer build). I'm strongly suspecting the game is in fact much too hard, although not necessarily for the reasons some people said. Anyway, I'm decreasing difficulty little by little, point by point. To be honest, it's an immensely frustrating process. At least the storage container seems to be working right for the most part. As of five or so hours of testing (accumulating less than three hours playtime do to dying and restarting numerous times) I'm still not at the point where I feel confident going down to B1 of Northstar, though. 1F of Northstar is still really scary.
* Removed the possibility of a Brown Bear encounter in the wilderness surrounding Lennisgrove. They're just too deadly.
* Lowered Brown Bear Defense stat by 2 so they're manageable when encountered in Bloodgully Mine, if you have decent arms and armor.
* Nerfed the beach area enemies in various small ways. They're probably still too tough, and they and the forest enemies definitely need more work, but at least they're not ridiculously stupid broken anymore.
* Increase Gordon's starting Health and Defense slightly to increase early game survivability. I STILL don't recommend going outside naked or mostly naked. Armor is still really essential.
* I've determined that LIGHT ARMOR needs a boost, somewhere to go from Studded Leather when Iron Chain goes to Steel Chain and Iron Plate goes to Steel Plate. Rather than just go with something like "Steel Studded Leather" I think I'm gonna go with something a bit more unique and magical feeling.
* Crafted the recurve bow for the first time. It works great. But the archer build (studded leather armor, recurve bow, iron ammos) is a major glass cannon without magical support.
* Considering which resources should be renewable/non-renewable. I'm still fine with limited wood, I like the challenge/resource management access of having non-renewable wood but running out of Evening Primrose/Synkefoil/Yarrow can really screw alchemists. Unless I'm forgetting something, without Yarrow there's no way to make healing potions and without healing potions...yeah. Oh, right, King Bolete. Time to go spelunking down in Bloodgully again.
* Unsuccessfully (tested?) alchemy with some of the saltwater fish and other new components. Either I forgot to add those recipes, or they're not working, or I forogt what they were. Gotta check.

Next week, if I'm feeling up to it, I want to add some actual new content. One idea I had was a teleport spell, for returning to town easily from dungeons. I should probably start working on the "High Arcana" type spells in general, the ones with non-combat effects.

I know these updates are kind of boring, since there's no ZOMG NEW GFX or ZOMG NEW SYSTEMS. But some people want to know that this is being worked on, and journaling my process helps somewhat alleviate the intense boredom and drudgery that comes with trying to slowly and steadily build a full game to completion as a one-man studio. The temptation to start new projects or switch to other projects is constant, and my limited self control is tested every day. But for now Journeyman is still actively progressing, bit by bit.