Happy New Year and a big Update!

Hope you're all having a great start to the year. I've been hard at work reworking the Fishing and Cooking systems. There was nothing inherently wrong with them, I thought the Cooking needed to flow and react better with the rest of the game, it felt a little disjointed to me. For the Fishing System, Shadow Dragon on the RMW Forums suggested limiting the player from only casting into a fishing zone instead of just all willy-nilly everywhere by water. I also had some ideas to make it a little more engaging. 

With the new Fishing system, it's less likely for the player to cast away from water. The only instance that it happens is when the player is moving or turning at the same time they cast. I had to rework the entire logic to account for 8 different casting directions but it's better this way and was more tedious than difficult to implement. For example: "can cast to the right" can cast to the right and down" ect. The biggest change to Fishing is now after "setting the hook" like before by mashing the Z/ENTER/"A" button you have to hold the button to reel in the fish. I changed the color hues on Fishing Progress bar that appears above the player. Some feedback said the red color made them think that the fish was getting away rather than caught. So now during the "hook" phase the color is Yellow and during the "reel in" phase it's green. Then to spruce things up and make it more tactile, I've added more sounds, blinking animations on the fish while being hooked and reeled in as well as the player. I also added a mild screen shake that goes up down during the "hook" phase and left and right during the "reel in" phase. The game engine only supports horizontal screen shaking by default so I wrote a small plugin to be add vertical shaking as well as change the shaking on the fly with a game switch.

The old cooking system was a map masquerading as a menu and felt a little sluggish and also a little detached from the game. The new system is a menu overlay that flies up immediately on the map screen and is a "bajillion" times more responsive. I had to completely rework how I handled the cooking menu. The old system had a dozen or so events timed very carefully to display relevant info and one main event to handle the logic. Now it's one streamed-lined event handling everything and doesn't need a separate map to handle it. I also reworked the food drops you get from cooking to make more sense as well as added some food items that I had not used sense early testing. The QTE bar is lengthened and the speed reduced a little to compensate for this. The overall visual representation has been improved with animated text for the names of the food cooked and upscaled icons. Mouse support is limited as I continue to improve the cooking menu. I have the scroll wheel working to change the selection, and clicking anywhere on the screen will select that selection. Might leave it this way if people like it, if not, I'm going to have to work in a picture button plugin somehow. During the QTE bar, you can click the screen and it acts the same as a button press.

Other improvements are added code to make the Menu loop back around when at the end or the beginning list of commands.

This is a full list from  the last update that I never posted a change log for:  Added AutoSave. This is still slightly experimental. Followers speed is increased when moving into and out of combat. Battlers now jump next to opponents and attack rather than on top of them. Added Full Recovery for characters when they Level Up. Removed Yanfly's Synch Monitor FPS and started using Mac's Hi Hertz Monitor Fixes. Art direction change to more antiqued and sketched look. Changed Title screen background. Changed Title Screen logo to the "Brass" Logo. Various bug fixes and grammar corrections. When joining the Guardsmen with Brand in the party, the dialogue no longer replays if you decide to not join yet. Nael has slightly different dialogue when talking to her in the temple depending on if you saved the soldier or not. Added missing resources.

This was a lot to do, and is a lot to test! Please report any bugs and I'll get them sorted ASAP!

Thanks,

Slaughty