First off: Is it dead, you ask? Is the Big Bad Bug dead? I'm pretty sure it is... but I'm waiting for its corpse to stop twitching before I make it official. So until then here's balance update #2:

A lot of you have been playing this game for 2, 5, 10, or even 50+ (!) hours. The prologue can be a fun bit of orientation the 1st, 2nd, maybe even 3rd time... but for grizzled veterans it must feel like that un-skippable skyrim cart intro (aka the 'on second thought maybe I don't want to start a new game after all' sequence).

But never fear! I've revamped the New Game dialog to let you skip the bits you've memorized by heart. And you can customize your game along the way!

Startup Skills & Spawn Locations

You can now choose which skills you start the game with. Some people have asked for the chance to start with NO skills (madness!) and others have asked for twice or more the starting number. Well here's your chance to experiment.

While you're at it, change your spawn location!** Try spawning in the middle of nowhere, or (if you still want to focus on the story) spawn in the University and skip the Prologue. You can also choose which startup gear & clothing you'll get. (There are only a few categories at the moment, though if you're feeling adventurous you could create more with a text editor.)

Difficulty Setting Customization

This is where you can get really experimental. Difficulty settings work by modifying global varibles. The default value for (say) run speed might be 1.0, but you could create a Slow And Tedious difficulty setting which sets that to 0.1 for some reason. Or you can modify the Hard difficulty setting to include permadeath, or to double all damage. Only a subset of globals are available to play with right now (a complete list is in Globals.ini) but requests are welcome. I'm curious to see what people come up with.

Character Customization

This isn't as big a deal since character customization has no impact on gameplay. But it can be nice to quickly set up your appearance without going through the prologue. (And if you choose to set it up here, the prologue letter will remember your choices and not prompt you for input.)

World Settings & Mods
At the moment World Settings just lets you customize day cycle length, but in the future it will work like difficulty settings & modify global variables. And Mods is blank for now. It will eventually be a convenience tool that lets you add / remove / choose which mods to use in your new game. (You can mod stuff manually until this is ready, of course.)

I hope this stuff gives you an idea of the level of customization & tweaking that I want to enable. And while we're talking about customization:

Color Blindness Mode / Dyslexia Font

If anyone out there is color blind, I could use your your help creating a color-blind color scheme. There's a color editor in the Options menu where settings like GenericHighValue (currently green) and GenericLowValue (currently red) etc can be altered and saved. So if anyone out there wants to take a stab at this I'd be grateful for the input. Once we have a good scheme I'll make it toggle-able in the options. Also, the long-promised dyslexia font isn't far behind. (You can change the default font to a blockier font already but it's a little flakey.)

Alright, that's it for now. Keep posting your bugs to the forums, I read every report even if I can't always respond! Cheers,
- L


**This is actually a devious scheme to encourage everyone to find bugs in different parts of the world. It turns out that most of you don't travel far from the University for the first 3-5 hours, which I didn't expect!