I've been busier than expected this past month with stuff outside of NEStalgia, so my activity in the community has been somewhat diminished lately. Now I'm finally free to return and focus on the game full time, and the first thing that I plan to do is to inform the community about what is in store for NEStalgia.

First and foremost, later this week we'll be starting up paid advertisements for the game which will (hopefully) increase our incoming stream of new players. Apart from those fire-and-forget ads, in the coming months my efforts will not be focused on promoting the game - instead I will be putting in some serious time and effort to take this project to the next level. What do I mean by that? Well, I intend to show and tell all week long.

Monday through Friday of this week I'll be making daily blog posts covering many different changes that will be coming to NEStalgia during May, June and July. From feature improvements to new story content and even sweeping gameplay changes, I'll be providing juicy details and screenshots about what you can expect. Those of you who enjoyed the Podcast will also be happy to hear that we'll be resuming our weekly schedule starting this Wednesday.

To give you an idea of what is in store this week, here are some new screenshots to whet your appetite. What you see here are mockups meant to demonstrate the forthcoming changes. Keep in mind that nothing has been finalized, and I'm sure that there will be plenty of tweaks during development.



The battle screen will be seeing some fairly significant changes which I'll explain in-depth later this week. On the left you can see the new basic move selection HUD which allows you to map abilities to different keyboard hotkeys. On the right is an example of the new battle spell HUD and the new visual indicators for status effects (both on players and monsters).



Next up on the left is a very rough mockup of what the skill trees will look like. Notice that we're going with more of the KOTOR/Mass Effect approach than the Diablo II/WoW approach. On the right you can see the new inventory HUD which splits up regular items, equipped gear and quest items.

As you can see, there are some pretty major changes in the works. What you see here is only the tip of the iceberg - check back tomorrow evening for more screenshots and details!






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