Alright, missed last week on the update front, but from now on, expect regular weekly progress blogs on Saturday night. And though we're all working on separate entries for the RMN summer games, there's still nightly progress being made on the game. If you need proof, anyone's feel to join us at #disconnect on dynastynet.net. And now on to what's been happening...

We've decided that the first demo (~two weeks from now) will be a mainly tech demo showing off the battle system and the MMO world. The offline portion should come in the following demo. If we were to have included the offline portion, it would've meant a very stripped down battle system and boring offline world, as most of the gameplay there is through messaging systems and dialogue.

Dudesoft's cycle is wrapping up, and we're starting to work on skinning up some of these menus. With the battle system basic mechanics down, it's now onto the problem of finding the right look... None of us are particularly gifted UI artists, but this mockup (helpfully provided by K-hos, thanks a bunch!) should give an idea of what we're going for:



We're also looking at how to handle class graphics between sprites and facesets. Here's the result, the four basic classes all ready for use in game:

Warrior/Mage/Rogue/Healer. They don't have hats or armor or spikes or chains or giant zippers yet as these are the basic classes on each tree. During the promotions for the first professional and master class, the portraits and sprites change to something more fitting.

And it looks like I (psy_wombats) will be taking over the project starting on Monday. Hopefully I'll be able to implement a rudimentary level up and skill select system before tying Deckiller's maps together for the demo release. Continuing the trend of ending updates on awful MSpaint artwork, here's the current status screen: