Things keep getting delayed unfortunately, although I’m still planning to release Alpha18 at the end of April or very early May. I was hoping that hooking up crash reporting through the Steam API would be easy, but I just can’t get it to work. I might have to use a back up plan in the form of the Google Breakpad library or my own, old crash reporting scripts. It’s something I need to get done before I can roll out a testing build to Steam.

Last week I added a slightly unrelated feature. Minable resources aren’t spawned at world generation anymore, you have to discover them by researching geology (to be fair, the game actually only spawns them at that point). The are currently three levels of the tech, and maxing them out, which will give you large amounts of iron and gold, will require a significant mana investment. Overall, I think it will add some needed balance to the game, and the ores can be generated around your base in a convenient way. Also, it will help me add more ore types later on, which has to do with a major gameplay feature that I’ll announce soon.

The campaign mode is mostly under control. Before writing this, I’ve been at war with Alderyk the Keeper, whom I had retired just an hour earlier. The last major fix I had to add involved stopping undead from traveling and, as a consequence, killing themselves during daytime. I still need to do some balancing, and fill the maps with more content, but that’s easy and pleasant stuff compared to my chores discussed in the first paragraph!