Tutorial mission done

The distance between blogs seems to be slowly creeping up. Be assured I'm still working hard on the game, but not a lot of visual candy to show off.  I've finished the tutorial mission in Magenta. It teaches the player how to fight, learn spells, gather herbs and do enchantments. It shows off some conversation choices and starts the main quest thread. I've decided going for a monkey-island comic style,  partially because its a very popular game that I've enjoyed myself,  and partially because my attempts at serious fantasy literature sucked badly.

On the technical front,  I've implemented the player load/save system now. I'm going to go with an auto-save whenever possible but avoid saving during conversations and specific points that might make it difficult to provide updates without breaking someones profile, like during spell casting or conversations.

Next on my list is to add Jesters (what would Ultima have been without all the pointless Jesters in the towns) and general mobile NPCs in the main cities,  and then I need the shops in finally so you've got something to spend your random drops on if they aren't needed for spell/enchantment recipes.

I just updated my iPhone4 to have GameCenter now and I'm very keen to start supporting it. At the very least, a health list of achievements would be easy to add.  I'd still like to add minigames to all the cities but I think this will have to come after initial release or I'll never get this thing on the shop. Christmas is already looking pretty doubtful unless I cut a lot of corners with the quest content and I don't want to risk bad reviews from releasing the game when its not ready...

I'm still working hard at my day job but we seem to have gotten the schedule under control now - at least as far as code goes, so hopefully I'll have more time for Magelore work now. I haven't added any new art in, but here's a shot of me fighting some caged rats in the tutorial mission.  A star now appears on the inventory icon whenever there are stat points to spend, or mission details have changed,  so the player should never get lost as to what to do next