Another month, another progress blog, huh?

I know I haven't posted a lot of new content on here lately, but don't worry, I work on this game a little bit every day. Mostly because I have nothing much else to do during these post-college job hunt blues. Well, there's a few maps that I still need to finish for a different project, but anyway...

The first dungeon is almost completed. Once I get around to finishing its boss battle and the cutscene(s) following it, I'm thinking about releasing a demo of the game up to that point. The game's length would be a lot shorter than I originally planned it to be. It'll vary depending on what the player does, but I'm thinking it'll end up being about 30 mins-1 hour. By putting something playable out there for you guys sooner than later, I could:

1) Address potential gameplay problems before I go further into a hole the rest of the game
2) Learn how fast the game runs on other people's computers
3) Put out something that has more than one battle :p

My laptop is about four years old now and it was never really made for modern gaming. It used to be able to run Oblivion on the lowest settings, but now it lags and stutters for many 3D games older than that, as well as some VX and Ace games.
I've noticed some serious lag in the battles while playtesting, and I don't want to put the player through that if I can help it. So I keep testing in order to find the causes, end up going in circles, and then realize that I may have spent too long on a problem that I can't fix by myself while the later content sits unfinished. Or maybe I'm just worrying too much about it--maybe the game runs just fine on other people's computers. I've been attempting to alleviate the lag here and there by removing event decorations that don't really contribute much to anything. But before anything's uploaded, I need to work out the kinks in the gameplay.

Bugfixing the battles are considerably slowing me down. There's all sorts of strange goings-on right now such as cooldowns not taking effect, regen not working at all, skill action sequences slowing down menus, and misplaced charset battlers upon death. Sometimes the bugs end up disappearing on their own...and pop up again soon afterward. These issues may be caused by bugs in Melody, or conflicting scripts somewhere. Hell if I know; my scripting knowledge's limited to basic interface edits right now. ¯\(°_o)/¯
On the bright side, none of those issues are game-crashing bugs!

I don't want to put a specific release date on the demo, but maybe I'll upload it during the summer? If you guys are cool with a one-dungeon demo, I'll see what I can do. :)

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Miscellaneous monthly updates:
- Added the "affection viewer", a simple menu where you can see how much the main character likes the other party members. The graphics for one character have been completed. I haven't finalized how many people will show up in it.
- The animation of Lorenz's "Flare Needle" skill is different and faster
- Remapped many indoor areas
- Rewritten a lot of cutscene and NPC dialogue