Howdy yall, it's Jack! The beta branch now has a highly unstable build of 6.0.0 with lots of bugs, it is merely a tech demo of the new combat system. This project has been through a lot over the years, and the team and player community has experienced a lot of highs and lows around this title. There have been a lot of missed opportunities, unmet expectations, and struggles with designing and developing this game. It has sort of served as the background project for developing Lasso Games as a company, and as a result of not turning away other opportunities that have presented themselves, we have gotten to do a lot of really cool things with other more successful projects and endeavors that you may have seen. (See MiniLaw and Highway Rampage) I have been pushing myself lately to try and make progress on this title, in spite of all the struggles, roadblocks, rocks, broken glass, spiders, and dragons I've run into while working on it. The Tradewind is patched and busted, but she sails still yet. I hope that you will consider the work that has been put into this beta build and be patient with the incomplete work I am presenting. I also took some time to get all our store and library assets updated in Steam to prepare us for the upcoming future development plans! Some things to notice that will be different from the 4.0.0 build we published as the Early Access build of the game:

Overhaul Updates

• Hand to hand combat now is a little more snappy and intutive. Movements should feel a little more modern and responsive.
• Enemy AI is a little smarter; some enemies will do stuff like try to dodge you or time attacks with variance.
• There is a stamina system! You can double tap forward to dash and pick up speed to clear longer hurdles.
• Bosses should be a lot smarter and engaging. A lot of work was done from the MiniLaw team to help make the enemies smarter in general in this update.

• On-screen text is drawn with a few more modern techniques and should be a little clearer for readability.
• The new text engine is going to allow us to do more interactive stuff with text and should build up a lot of opportunities to engage the player on the plot more and add emphasis and what not to text. It should make it a bit easier for developers to manage how the text is drawn and make it a little easier on ourselves.
• Stores and vendors, basically anything that draws text in the game is using a new implementation so you should see general improvements across the board in how that stuff works.

• Dialogue for a lot of NPCs has been updated or improved, though the narrative elements are largely inaccessible due to the broken features I'm about to mention:

Stuff To Look Out For

• You may encounter random crashes to desktop, at any time, for any reasons. GameMaker does a great job of emitting detailed reports and I'm happy to read any reports in the steam forums and try to address them; this build is a MAJOR overhaul and is just trying a lot of new things, and there is an absolute TON of legacy code in this project that just straight up doesn't work anymore due to IDE updates and poor practices and standards from myself and other team members throughout this title's extremely long development cycle. Bear with us on these and look to see if something has been reported first before reporting, we have an extremely deep backlog of bugs and crashes to look at.
• A lot of stuff that worked in 4.0 just doesn't now, for a multitude of reasons we are still actively trying to identify. This game was originally built in GameMaker 1.4~~something and we are now on GMS2v@2024.8.171; it's a huge jump in technology and we are having to patch up the whole ship while are also trying to build it and sail it. We need First Mate Jonathan to show us how it's done and get us to shore!
• There might be stuff in levels that looks out of place, missing floor tiles, weird backgrounds that don't make sense, odd sky colors or weird shapes. I have seen...every weird configuration of elements crowded on screen in this build, feel free to report or share anything, I think they are hilarious.
• A ton of weapons and sub weapons just don't work yet either. You might have trouble picking up stuff, using items, sub weapons might just not do what you expect them to. We are working on it to make all the weapons and items we originally designed work in the new systems.

Where We Go From Here?