Although I haven't managed to escape the first 15 minutes of the game in terms of what's ready to ship quite yet, progress is still being made, and lots of it.
Last week I mentioned one of the hangups was the professions tab not correctly listing known recipes. Since then, I ran into another hangup that prevented professions from gaining levels and experience. Fixing the second issue also fixed the first issue, so now you'll be able to view your learned recipes from the Professions tab like I originally intended.
I ran into a similar issue while troubleshooting auto-discovery for your Journal entries. While I still need to do custom entries for the People tab, I've gotten the Bestiary and Conditions tab (which hold all the information for enemies and the game's states respectively) working as intended, but with the addition of custom notes, so you get all the lore I'd otherwise not be able to include with raw enemy stats.
I also mentioned the research system, which is now complete and partially tested, and that worked exactly the way I wanted it to, which is a welcome change of pace from some of the hair loss I experienced over getting some of the other mechanics working. There's still a little building out I need to do, especially for cooking, but it's nice to have development (mostly) going smoothly again.
The remaining major mechanics are the things I'm not confident will go quickly, because they're reliant on plugins I've never used before and/or may require me to implement a more complicated solution.
The first is a map system. The plugin I found claims to be able to create maps that show you how much of an area you've explored, which will work as a great alternative to the way I currently provide exploration rewards. Everything except a visible map is already implemented in the demo, but visualizing it is a major quality of life change that would make finding and getting exploration rewards so much more intuitive. The trouble being that I'm not sure how easy it'll be to implement or if it'll work at all, so this may require some retooling or may not even make it into the game.
The second is parrying. If you've played Expedition 33, you're already familiar with the general idea (and if you haven't, you really should, it's a phenomenal game). In short, if you "perfect parry" you'll counter-attack, with the next step down being a perfect block, and the next step down being a partial block, ending with you taking full damage if you miss entirely. This is something that I feel the new direction requires, so if I'm not able to use a plugin to make the process easier, I'll have to explore methods on doing it the hard way, and doing it the hard way is likely to be rather time consuming.
That's just the big mechanics, though. There's still lots of little things that need attention, like making sure name boxes exist, balancing combat according to how the parry system works, entering all the quests and making sure those entries are fully readable since the scroll on those boxes won't work, trying to balance out the economy so you aren't able to completely break it but you also aren't constantly struggling to avoid starvation, and probably at least half a dozen other things I can't name off the top of my head.
Those smaller things will generally go pretty quickly once they're identified, though, and won't have a meaningful impact on overall gameplay even if they're enough to notice (like missing name boxes).
Progress is coming along pretty nicely, but I'm still very much in a space where I can't say exactly how much longer development is going to take before we actually hit v0.1. Since we're at the end of the month, I'll be putting up a poll to help me understand how you want development of v0.2 onward to function. The TL;DR on that is finding out if you want monthly updates no matter what, or if you're okay with a "it's done when it's done" approach. If you have an opinion about that, head over to Patreon or Subscribestar and consider supporting me if you aren't already. That poll will be going up this Friday.
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