Hello!

At least hello to all of you that are still following this page and waiting patiently for us to finish up the demo. We have a bunch of news for things some of them good and some of them not as good so I will get right into things.

We got very close to finally finishing the demo. As Deckiller was adding some polish to some maps (aka remapping them completely in some cases), we had several discussions about how to really make the game stand out and pop from the herd of typical RM games as well as the swath of games using Time Fantasy resources now.

Ultimately, we came to the decision that it would require some custom art commissions. Luckily, it just so happened that I had a small windfall so I had some money to put into these art commissions. I spent quite a days in December talking to several pixel artist about things that we needed. After several message exchanges with handful of them as well as ordering some sample pieces of things here and there... One thing that was important is all this had to be in 12 to 16 bit styles utilizing existing TF colors or allow for us to recolor them with existing TF colors. I finally settled on two artists that are now at work on the upgrades.

• One artist is handling one of the more tedious upgrades... The battle system. We found someone to redo the battlers in isometric (3/4th view) for both the actor battlers and the enemy battlers.
  
• The other artist is handling the other upgrades... busts for the recruitable characters and important npcs as well as some UI upgrades, the tiny armies clashing during the army battles, and the isometric battlebacks.
  

So we were now in a lull waiting on commissions as we ran into the holiday season. This would ultimately slow commissions down as one artist won't start until tomorrow and the other one was just busy so had minimal time to work on the commissions.

I also had to take some time away to work on a game for my son that I was making in MZ. After using MZ for several weeks I found I really liked it so when I returned focus to LSDX it prompted a new research project after seeing several people say that it was quite simple to convert from MV to MZ. After discussing with Deckiller who had been using MZ for one of his games he agreed that if was worth it if we could do it.

Since we wanted to add some QoL things to the event code and maps (like light flashing arrows for door/passage indicators) during another polish run of the event codes and we are waiting on commissions it was a good time to test it. I am happy to report that we tried it out this weekend.

All plugins have been replaced with their MZ equals at this point and I have started combing the code polish it and make use of MZ's upgrades with Plugin Commands. I have not experienced any bumps at all... and additionally some of the systems that I thought I had to toss out because of MV's issues I was able to bring back with available MZ functions or plugins that were not broken and played nicely with all the other plugins we used.

Additionally... I pretty much was able to take the plugin count from like 100+ to less than 40 since most of VisuMZ Plugins handled the functions of multiple YEP MV Plugins. A bonus is that I am also getting to upgrade the Dueling and Army Minigame HUDs because of an MZ plugin.

All in all the next round of polish that we hopefully finish off this week or next week while we are waiting on commissions to finish will complete 90% of the demo and 100% of the MV to MZ migration. Then it is just closing up the odds and ends to connect all the systems together so the demo story flows from start to finish... and applying all the new fancy artwork to the demo then rebalancing the battle system and tweaking the position codes for isometric battles.

I want to say it will be sooner than later, but I want to give myself enough room to work on the off-chance that commissions or medical things pop up again so I am tentative (again I know) saying by end of March 2021 for the demo to release.

The rest of the game shouldn't take as long beyond the demo for several reasons.

• All subsystems are finished and programmed so they just need to be applied to the later parts of the story.
  
• Most of the demo is original content developed as part of LSDX mixed with a bit of the original intro whereas there is only a handful of original content added to later parts of the game so quite a bit of the dialogue/event code can be lifted from the 2k/2k3 versions.
  
• Future Art Commissions of the upgraded stuff will be happening at the same time as development or long before their are needed in the development cycle instead of having to wait on it to apply new things to the game.
  

The final piece of this long announcement happens to just be an update on something I had announced last year when we were given permission to go commercial with the game. Matt, the original creator of LS, was going to try to get involved in the development somewhat, but a new baby in combination with several other indie projects he was working on kept him busy this year. Now, it looks like he should be able to jump in the fold just shortly into the new year. We are planning another meeting to finalize details around his involvement with the project. Fingers crossed that we will have some more exciting news to announce in the coming weeks.