We are back again A lot of time has passed! Dont worry, we from team FervorCraft were just very busy working on the game. Well, and during February and March we also had conventions to attend in Dresden (DeDeCo) and Leipzig (MCC 2024), thus needing to invest some of our time into creating new prints for our booth as well.
But apart from that we have continued working on it and managed to make a lot of progress. A Semi-Linear Story Section When we werent busy attending conventions, we took care of the first sections of Chapter 3 in which the players will have to take action themselves: the entire Southwest of Zhetan will be available to you! What does that mean? Here, the plot will continue semi-linear. While the main quest will give you a final destination, numerous optional locations are open to visit - even if some might prove to still pose a sizeable challenge. But an extensive trip has never failed yet to make you more familiar with the final companion. Here are a few impressions of the areas we have finished or are currently still working on.









The Plot Must Go On! But how about the plot for the whole game? How far along are we? As mentioned, we focussed on the first section of Chapter 3. For a good reason: we divided the contents of the chapter into thirds - to serve as milestones during development - and we have finished all the texts of important scenes for the first third of it; whats missing now is their implementation. Sidequests and NPCs are in the works as well but will probably get implemented when the main quest for this segment is also fully playable. In short: regarding the story we finished all the groundworks and will add in the rest one by one before proceeding to the next segment. Art Assets We made a lot of new graphic assets or edited or finalized existing ones over the past few months. Apart from pixelart and effects for the different areas, there have also been new NPCs added which will become more important in Chapter 3.


RPG MAKER XP evolves into MKXP-Z One of the two most substantial changes we made was changing the engine Charon - Zhetan Chronicles will run in when finalized. Development continues in RPG MAKER XP which is still more than suitable for that job but is showing more and more issues when it comes to actually running the game. Thus, weve decided to go for the MKXP-Z framework! What is that?, you might ask. Well, its a C++-based framework specifically intended for the Maker generations XP, VX and VX-Ace that allows games to be played fitting more contemporary standards (It is often used as a base for fan projects in the Pokmon community as well). Which in our case means:

• a much more stable performance
• the possibility to use updated Ruby code (the standard in RPG Maker is rather outdated)
• freely adjustable window resolutions*
• fonts loading automatically
• the ability to connect it to the Steam-API for achievements etc.
• portability onto other operating systems**

• damage done by heroes and enemies is not strictly capped anymore, making buffs and debuffs more noticeable
• character level now got a bit more impact on the damage calculations; equipment and action levels remain very important but forgetting to take care of them for a hot second shouldnt result in a frustrating bottleneck anymore
• the heroess LPs have been increased and adjusted to the enemiess damage so players should not get not challenged enough nor immediately destroyed either - except when trying to go for a boss way above their level.
• the reconstruction also allows for an easier implementation of future enemies, since status effects are now much easier to calculate and adjust