Hello everybody! I just wanted to say, first and foremost, HAPPY NEW YEARS! Looks like humanities made it another year without (sadly) a zombie rampage. I guess that deserves some sort of celebration. Well. Unless you're a zombie. Then it's just not a good year for you.

UPDATE NEWS: WHAT'S NEW IN CHAPTER 2

FIGHT ENGINE - To get the ball rolling, I want to announce that I've fully revamped the battle system for Chapter 2. While it still retains it's core design, I looked at how many people were playing the game and made a lot of modifications. Aside from cleaning up the interface and making it more, how shall we say, "elegant", a LOT of my focus has been geared towards providing essential information without cluttering up the already packed display. As you can tell from the screen shot, buffs and afflictions (as well as other information) is now packed nicely in the corner, and with the mouse, you can view what kind of buffs/debuffs are affecting your party members just by going over them. Like in WoW. (Yes, I shamelessly stole a good idea when I saw it). Also note that strengths and weaknesses have now been compacted and moved to the left corner, just near the HP bar (which was also redesigned). There are also new and varied types of SUPPORT characters.

I worked on more than just aesthetics, though. A lot of improvements are "under the hood", so you'll get a chance to try it out when I release a test demo (hopefully) sometime in the next two weeks. I need bug testers to week out anything I might have missed.

TALENT POINTS - As I've already announced, there are now over 75 UNIQUE upgrade points. A lot of them are damn cool and I spent an entire week (this week in fact) finalizing them and making them all really useful. Some modify existing skills, some affect the entire party, some boosts stats. It's really a fun gimmick and makes this, in my opinion, one of the most - if not THEE most - sophisticated Flash RPG ever made. Yes, I'm making that claim. It's going to be awesome.

WEAPON / ITEM SYNTHESIZING - This was a feature I wanted to do for Chapter 1, but I didn't have the time to implement it. But now it's ready. After battle, you'll often find SCRAPS. By finding "Schematics" littered throughout the game world, you'll be able to create new weapons, items and armor from existing gear.

Well that's all for now. I'll try and have a playable "test" demo out within the next couple of weeks. I'm sure there's a few bugs that need to be panned out. Oh, and this is for my fans - THANK YOU SO MUCH for your patience and support. It means a lot to me that I still get the occasional email asking me when Chapter 2 is coming out - and I promise it's coming! As you may or may not know, I recently graduated from OCS and I'm currently Lieutenant in the Army. Sometimes I have a lot of time for hobbies like this, and others... well, you know. But again, THANKS for being my fans. i won't let you down. =D