Silent blog means busy working

A lot of small stuff being done like adding items, creating new skills to craft them, expanding the world, adding NPCs, ...

The most important is probably the "Welcome" zone for new players. I want to get a solid 10 minutes of play/exploration that will help new players to figure what the game is about. After those 10 minutes, they should know enough to start enjoying the game.

It means building an in-game tutorial (short and not telling too much) but also making sure the place where new players will appear have enough stuff around for them to get started. This means basic skills trainers, mine, trees to cut and a non-risky combat experience. I recently added roads to lead players to points of interest instead of letting them loose in the wild.

Once this part is done, I'll probably have enough stuff to invite more testers. I'd like to finish the intro zone this week so I can shift gears and reach my "end of spring" objective for release.

Till then, here's a small excerpt from the skills tree:

- Carpenter (apprentice)
----- Wood basket
----- Bench
----- Table
----- Wood module (small)
----------Wood module (medium)
---------------Wood module (large)
----- Carpenter (intermediate)
---------- Kitchen counter
---------- Carpenter (expert)
--------------- Architect (apprentice)
-------------------- Small houses
-------------------- Architect (intermediate)
------------------------- Medium houses
------------------------- Pub
------------------------- Architect (expert)
------------------------------ Big houses