Howdy,

I've been trying to balance things out, I can only work on this project when I can afford to as it's not a source of income yet. That said I've been busy hammering away with making a game launcher so that the game will auto-update in the future, and also allow users to opt into the more unstable dev branch of the game if they choose.

At first I tried using a third party tool to make the game launcher. I won't name the tool because I think it serves a purpose and audience quite well, but there were some limitations I couldn't get over. For one it would only work for Windows devices. While this does cover the majority of players it's not enough. This method would require me to come up with a separate launcher for other platforms. The launcher tool also didn't allow for easy translation swapping like Godot currently offers me. Also lacking a few other more minor features I'd like or need I decided to learn how to make one myself.

This took some experimentation as network stuff is pretty alien to me. After trying to make it so updates would be downloaded as a ZIP file and extracted when ready, I found a few limitations with this approach too. Damn, I have to learn to do it proper.

Well I am happy to say the launcher is 95% ready, all the important bits of code are done and tested, just tying up loose ends now. All standard stuff, here's the features the launcher has (so far, subject to change in the future):

• Swap version branch (i.e. Stable, Dev)
• Read news updates about the game
• Read version patch notes
• Link to Twitter account for studio
• Link to game website (Still hosted on itch primarily)
• Link to the discord group (just starting)
• Link to the musician's website (Hexenkraft)

I've included a system to auto-update the launcher itself too (getting meta now), so the following updates to the launcher will be rolled out in time:

• Change game settings
• Ability to launch straight into the game bypassing the main menu
• Fixes/tweaks/polish

I hope to be able to bring you this new launcher as well as the tweaks and changes I've made to the game since last update really soon.

Cheers,

Leo LeBlanc