It's amazing how fast a small team can go :)  There is so much less overhead then in a bigger company.  Anyways, a lot has changed since we let a few sites preview the game. 

The storyline quests are finally in.  So much more of the story is actually seen in the game and it ties in a lot of the background stories.  This means we have a normal quest line, a huge backstory, and a dynamic world.  I think this makes for a very interesting and immersive world.

Most of the assets are done.  We still have a few things that are left and probably a lot of small tweaks, but most of it is in the game and working.

And tons of things have been tweaked and changed to make the game better over the past few weeks.  Most of the changes came from the team or the testers, but we even improved a bunch of things based on the previews.  So we do try to listen to everyone's feedback.

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Yesterday I found out how fickle the influence you have with the town's people can be.  This isn't too common but this is what happens when you have independent entities running around doing whatever they want to do and you have random events.

Well it's getting towards the end of one of my games and I'm comfortably in the lead of influence.  Influence isn't the most important thing to have but it's still very nice because you can use it for trade, the more influence you have the more taxes you pull in, and it ultimately allows you to buy better guards for your house.

Anyways, I have more influence than everyone else when the Brotherhood of Steel starts raiding the Monster Slayers.  Well if you destroy another covenant you get most of their influence so it's a pretty big boost.  So I jump in to try to get the credit of destroying before the Brotherhood does but I was a little too slow and they did too much damage before I got there and they got the credit.  As expected they got a big boost in influence but I was still a little ahead.

Then the random events kicks in (specifically kicking me) and a rumor gives the Brotherhood a bunch of influence and they take the lead.  Then a minute later it happens again.  Another rumor puts them even further ahead. 

All of this happened in the span of a couple minutes.  I went from being way ahead to way behind in influence.  Oh well.  I'm still going to destroy them sooner or later, it just got a little harder.

I've always found it fun when you're playing a strategy game and all of the other groups in the game are at war with one another and you are the only one that is not involved.  A lot of the time it lets you get ahead while everyone else just kills each other.

Well in Depths of Peril there is another interesting side twist.  Unlike other games, the enemies aren't way off somewhere else.  They are all inside of the same town that you are.  So when they fight you can almost always watch if you want.

Like yesterday, I was buying some stuff from the armorsmith and overheard a lot of battle sounds.  First I was surprised because the sounds didn't seem to be coming from any of the covenant houses and the town wasn't being attacked or anything.  So I wander over to see what is going on and right there between two of the covenant houses is two covenants in a pretty big battle.  It wasn't even a raid but had both full covenants and most of the house guards in the battle.  It was actually pretty cool just to sit there and watch them battle it out.

I would guess that both covenants sent someone out to talk to an NPC in town at the same time and got into a small fight.  And then that small fight grew into the battle I saw as the rest of each covenant came out of their houses to help in the fight.  The lesson from this is: if you are at war with your neighbor that only lives 100 feet from you, be careful when you leave your house :)

We have basically our first preview up on Game Banshee now.  You can read it here.  It's not exactly the type of game that the previewer likes, but the article is still a pretty accurate view of the game except for two minor points.  Both of these are very rare, so no one would probably notice them for a long time, but I would like to clarify them anyways.

You can actually recruit some NPCs without a quest.  Occasionally, you can find a potential recruit wandering around in the world.  These NPCs will join your covenant without solving a quest for them.

The other minor thing is that you can fight the other covenants outside of the town but you must be at war with them.  So it doesn't happen too often, but if you run into an enemy covenant that you are war with outside of town, you will get into a fight.

I haven't noticed many games that have put up any kind of bloopers before, so I thought I would put up one of ours from a couple weeks ago.  The image below is what happens to a Torva when the bones in the animation file don't match the bones in the skeleton file.

If you want to see what the torva is supposed to look like go here.