Happy New Year everyone! First of all, thank you so much for your encouraging comments on the patch! We’re happy you like it, and we’ll continue ironing out the bugs as you find them! Sounds are on their way as well, and that little bit of polish left before a stable release. Hope you’ve had a splendid start to the year; for us, it’s finally back into action so let’s jump right into it!

We’ll begin this new year with improving the Dojo exterior of Evergrind City, adding the version of the building that’s found in Arcadia (with a few edits), and upgrading the look of the fence and the practice dummies:

With all of us back in the office and a new year upon us, it seemed time to sit down and have a discussion of what’s next to come. This is the first in a series of meeting we’ll have over the coming days, the rest of which I’ll detail in the coming week(s), where we’ll try to make a plan for the coming year so it’ll be a bit more structured – and hopefully more efficient than the previous one.

Our first order of business is to sort out a plan for getting the stable update up and running, so today we made a list of what needs to be made:

* A few more sound effect requests videos, where we record what animations need sound and explain approximately what’s happening or what sort of effect we’re looking for. We’ve already requested most of the sound effects, which are currently in progress of being made by awesome Fark, but there are a few remaining one that we need from things added after we sent the first batch to him.

* Come up with and design the items found in the chests around the ships, a total of four different items. We had some ideas before but we’ll finalize it before making the actual items.

* Finish the ghost quest given by the bartender: aside from the three main quest ghosts, there will be a bunch of optional ghosts you can help regain their memories and gather in the main hall.

* A pet skull

* Effects for the cards; again, we have some ideas, but haven’t finalized them.

* A proper cutscene to end the stable version; there will be one more part of the story which will launch you on your quest to the final dungeon, after which the true ‘to be continued’ will appear.

* Make ghosts around the areas with graves such as the graveyard in pumpkin woods, the lonely grave in Seasonne and some proper ghost versions of the characters still remaining in Tai Ming.

* Add Pine’s office to Flying Fortress

Once these are all up and running we should be happy enough to release the update on stable – after some additional testing, of course. Our aim is to get this out around the end of the month, though some of the things will likely take a while to finish up due to their complex nature, such as the final cutscene of this patch. Fingers crossed!

First though, continuing on with the Evergrind fixes! This time around it’s time for the HQ to get a bit of a touch up:

And before we move on, time to go back and do some quick fixes to some of the things not yet quite ‘there’. First up, adding more carpets to the school, so now everyone gets one of their own:

Can’t have too many carpets, so added one outside the café as well:

This laundry has been hanging here to dry forever, so time to change things around and make both new poles and new laundry (hopefully these will dry quicker ;)):

In the hat shop we added another mirror:

As well as updated the target practice outside Robin’s house:

In the animation department, Fred’s working on getting a bunch of ghosts ready with their proper animations, making the torch puzzles more visually pleasing:

So with those in place, the torch puzzles now look a bit more like this: