Hello everyball! It's October and that means we're now safely within Autumn. So what about that 0.9.7 release? It's almost ready! Today we announce the release date for the next update and also show recent progress including the output of our recent CrossWeek!

Release Date for version 0.9.7

Let's get right to the point: we plan to release the update next week on October 13, 2017. On a Friday. Such a nice date, right? Anyway, here is what you can expect from CrossCode 0.9.7.

• New Area: Sapphire Ridge with new enemies and lots of crazy jumping puzzles.
• Several new Quests in Ba'kii Kum and Rookie Harbor.
• Updated Portrait Graphics for Captain Jet, Satoshi and lots of other NPCs

As you can probably see, version 0.9.7 doesn't include a lot of new content. That's not because we've been lazy (mostly) but because we've been working on a lot of story content that we still want to keep secret until the 1.0 release. Essentially we're going for a very big 1.0 release that will come with a ton of new content at once so that you play the rest of the story up to its conclusion in one go.

CrossWeek + Recent Progress

Since the last post we made a lot of progress with Sapphire Ridge, which is why we can now share a lot of new screenshots:


Sapphire Ridge also comes with several new caves:

And also plenty new enemies such as...
...new mysterious bugs...
...mechanical pandas....
...and too many spiders. In addition we've been working on new quests such as:
...fighting strange sharkster boss enemies and...
...fighting floating turrets in the middle of the ocean (this one is still very much WIP). And finally, as mentioned before, we found the time to polish a lot of old portraits including all those overly simplified NPC portrait
Guards now wear proper helmets!
Random NPCs have... EYES!
Shads are more shiny than ever!
Captain Jet is more fancy looking as well! Also, a lot of the new stuff you see here has been created during our most recent CrossWeek! CrossWeek is where part of the team meets up in Hannover, Germany to work on CrossCode full-time for a whole week. That usually means we get a lot of stuff done and that was definitely the case this time! And if you're curious how CrossWeek looks like here a few photos:
Doing gamedev and cooking at the same time!
Breaking ovens! At least we didn't burn anything this time.
Finishing most of the tasks! That's all for today! We hope you look forward to the next 0.9.7 update. Until then!