I wish fresh produce grew as quickly in my garden as it does in the plots in IainPeregrine's Plunder Gnome. The latest edition of Plunder Gnome takes the 12 year old game and brings it up to par with the latest features in available in BYOND 5.0. Up to four teams can now play at once, AI is ready to be beaten, and homes are ready to be plundered!

Zenith's Call is the name of the game formerly known as Z-Tatics, as the isometric game gains substance and the storyline is fleshed out. Zete's development timeline currently places the game to enter open alpha testing within a few months.

Ganite is causing some mayhem in Bomb & Run! Current images show that bombs can be placed and pushed, and power ups can be found in the remains of crates.

Grab your reading glasses for this next one, as Azusa: The Olympians War moves into Beta 1.0.0. New title screens, artwork, terrain and building destruction, bone busting, and many more features are covered! Tips are now displayed for new players, character creation is brand new, names aren't known instantly, and The Underworld is much, much deeper.

Ginseng has marked up a road map for Psiforged in the game's Discord channel recently, setting the stage for a larger map and a mini-map to help keep players straight. Four towns and one city are planned, and players are initially tasked with keeping the residents safe from the Emperor. A Kickstarter campaign is planned for later this year, and check out Ginseng's BYOND Vision, featured towards the end of this column.

ACWraith has recently made a change to Grim Prospects, allowing the game to once again be played! He then appended a Classic suffix to the game, updated the design and created a new hub page, as he begins work on designing a real deck of cards to play the game with.

Lore has been building in Pixel Realm's Spires of Agartha, with recent conflicts involving the Battle on the Border and Grey Sky. Spire Shard usage is becoming automated, and shopkeepers have been fixed. Several spells have been modified, and team member Nadrew has been outfitted with a new rig.

Travylleb is getting homework done on The School District: Online. First he mentions potential round styles that are planned, then goes into showing how New Drake city is laid out, with the general map completed, and concludes with a link to the game's Discord channel, where future students can keep up with developments around campus.

BYOND Resources

Ginseng's 2018 BYOND Vision

What can I say, other than 2017 being exceeding better than 2016. I'm sure that's something we can all agree on. But having just entered 2018 now, there's a lot going on within the BYOND community and many projects to look forward to.

For me, the start of 2017 was both the end of something old and the beginning of something new. I worked in my free time on some anime projects during 2016 and by the start of 2017, I was glad to be out and clean. It was like an addiction, the constant approval from an army of dedicated anime fans, but in the end, it squandered and suppressed any real creativity and ambition and encouraged lazy, poor programming. With that said and done, I moved onto Psiforged, a project inspired from a variety of great games and anime, but possessing an identity of its own distant enough from what inspired its creation. 2018 is looking promising, and with just about a years worth of work now locked into the game, there's a lot to show and even more to do.

These are exciting times and I'm looking forward to showing people just how far the BYOND Engine has come and the extent of its power from updates in the least two years. It's been a dream of mine to release a proper game since I was a child, ever since first playing Neko on Windows 95. Perhaps that dream shall soon become a reality! Thank for reading.