We hate to do this again, but the more we get done on Arc VI, the more we realize there is left to do. I'm sure you recall that some time ago we announced that Arcs VI and VII would be combined into one massive final chapter. The rationale for this at the time is that the standalone Arc VII was looking like it was going to be on the short side, not really suitable for the concluding chapter of a game this size.

However, now that we're about halfway through, we're confronting certain realities about the large-scale story we've set up over the last few years. There are many loose ends to tie up, questions to answer, plot points to address so that nobody feels like the game has ended prematurely. There were many who finished Arc V and wondered aloud questions like "How are they going to deal with all of this?" I don't think any of us knew how right you were.

When all the needed plot points are lined up, it amounts to a lot of extra content. Enough that will stretch Arc VII to a pretty respectable length.

So the bad news is that we've been going back and forth on this like clumsy politicians. But there is a lot of good news in this scenario. Wondering what that is? For one, Arc VII is now going to have an additional dungeon! It will utilize some puzzle ideas that ArtBane tried out for V but ultimately nixed. But the best bit of good news for you all is that because I said we were about "Halfway done" that means that returning to the two arc approach will make Arc VI ready for release as early as August.

So sorry to change things up on you again, but game design is a tricky thing. I can't imagine switching again, especially once we get another completed arc out there. Please look forward to it!

Another year of the Misaos comes to a close, and this year Master of the Wind gets two. Best Dialogue and Best Level Design! I have to say, I'm very pleased to finally grab that Dialogue win...and to win for Arc V, which has easily the most personal story...it's a nice feeling. ArtBane gets to add a second win in the Level Design category to his internet mantle, though we all know he should have about five or six of these.

Some friends of ours also had success this year. Anaryu took Best Non-RPG for SkyE, and Reives took home another big haul with wins for Quintessence as well as the cinematic Do You Remember My Lullaby short. Congrats to them and the other winners.

Thanks to all who voted this year, and we hope to deliver Arc VI before this next round of awards!

P.S.: As with last year, we'll reward you guys with a screenie, but I'm not sure which one yet. Details to follow.

That came quick, eh? Well, voting is open for this year's Misao awards and Master of the Wind has been honored with six nominations this time - Best Lead Character (Stoic), Best Dialgoue, Best Storytelling and Direction, Best Level Design, Best RPG and Game of the Year.

Vote here!

I doubt we'll win Game of the Year two times in a row...that sounds excessive even to me. Still, some of those awards would make me quite proud. In particular, I've lost that damn Dialogue category 3 or 4 years in a row. Kate Winslet broke her losing streak this year....will I?

Thanks everyone for supporting the game year round!

I plan on releasing a patched version of the Super Duper Pack (arcs I-V). I haven't tried to cover up in the past that the Master of the Wind battle system is a bit of a mess. It just became much more apparent in the later arcs with more and more physical skills becoming useless. So I've gone back and made some changes and now all skills are based almost entirely on attack power instead of static damage points like before.

Why didn't I just do this in the first place? Well, dear reader, that's because in the past I've had issues with dual wielders attack power being much greater than two handed wielders meaning their skill damage was significantly higher. But, with a little more thought, I realized that I could base skill damage on just the first hand weapon So now skill damage is entirely based on just the weapon in the main (right) hand. This of course meant I had to go back and retool all the physical skills, but I'm happy to report now that every skill is viable in combat, even initial skills like Bludgeon.

The update will replace the main download on the site. I imagine though most people will just want to wait until arc VI to experience the battle changes. Either way, I'll edit this post when it is available.

Just uploaded the Super Duper Pack again with all the fixes to the bugs posted in the beta thread. Thanks everyone who helped out. You can get the game at the same address as before.

In addition, the individual arcs are no longer available for download. I want there to be just one definitive version for now. If you played the standalone arcs though you won't have to worry about there being any problems when transferring your save file to arc VI. Everything should still be in order. If you were in the middle of playing the standalone games you can attempt to transfer your save files to the Super Duper Pack but I can't promise there won't be issues.

On the arc VI front, the first dungeon of the arc has been completed and believe me when I say it's a substantial one. So much so, it's broken into three parts. I may drop some previews in the near future.

For a little over a month now there has been a closed beta for the revised compilation of the first five arcs. A lot of updates have been made since and now I am going to open it up to the public. So here it is: MotW Super Duper Pack. If you haven't already, you should check out the previous news posts for an indepth look at what was revised.

On my side, there's been a lot of tweaking and rethinking of some of the earlier puzzles that caused frustration for players. A lot of them I just had to update the code like the Bull Rush puzzles that appeared in the earlier arcs. If you aren't familiar with them, they're like a quicktime event where arrows appear on the screen and you need to match them in a small amount of time. Before if you held down the button too long when the next one appeared it would register as a miss but now I have the game wait for button input so that won't happen. It was a bit of hassle updating all the Bull Rush puzzles, particularly the special case ones like the Super Bull Rush in the Ice Temple and the Wind Jump in the Sparrow Chase but it had to be done. There is also an option to use dynamite (now sold by the Gino) if you really suck at it.

Super Bullrush

Another puzzle that got recoded was the Underwater Minigame with Stoic and the Lodites. I've had mixed reports on this game from people who think it was too difficult to people who think the difficulty was what made it so intense. So I went back to make a scaling difficulty that would be based on whether the player lost or not since losing the game now just causes a reset rather than a game over. I am trying hard to avoid game overs. Even though there is a save right before the minigame, game overs can be really off putting and you waste time reloading your save file. Instead of punishing the player, I want to try to make the game adapt to their level of skill. So now behind the scenes the game will become easier everytime you fail out. It's very subtle unless you fail a lot of times so most people probably won't even notice unless they read this blog.

To do this though I had to recode the entire thing. Before it was two events with 30+ pages! You can imagine how difficult that would be to manage. Fortunately I know a lot more about programming now so I was able to split it into several different events and make it modular so I could reuse it if I wanted to. Veterans who play this segment again may not notice much of a difference but under the hood it's like I took a mess of wires and organized them all into neat pairings. Newbies who maybe aren't as quick on the reflexes as others should appreciate the changes anyway.

Underwater Minigame

The biggest changes though have been made to the Baron Shooting segments. I had been feeling more and more that they were out of place. Even though MotW is a game filled with a variety of different puzzles, the shooting segments used one element none of the others did: a mouse. This was a problem cause some players have laptops and generally those mouses are terrible. Or maybe they were playing with a controller. In any case, I hated them and I only felt obligated to use the system in arc V cause I had in previous arcs. So what I did was do away with the mouse scripts and coded my own system titled the Baron Shooting (BS) system. Anaryu got me into naming my own systems now.

The BS system uses the keyboard so no need for those troublesome mouses. Of course this meant I had to rethink and recode every shooting puzzle so far which fortunately there were very few of. Since now you were using the keyboard there was no way you could aim the target cursor at the speed you did with the mouse. So I introduced the Bullet Time element to the system which cuts the frequency of events in half making them viable targets. To spice up the system even further I also added in a little aiming sub-game (inspired by Cast Aside Ep. 2) where two bars move back and forth and you need to synchronize them to hit your target. The bottom bar consistently goes at the same speed everytime but the top bar's speed is determined by how far your target is. The max is ten tiles away and if you are trying to shoot anything that far away good luck cause the meter is running at ludicrous speed. The way I designed the system though you never have to aim that far away unless you want to. But screenshots are not enough to express this system so I have videos for anyone interested.

Baron Shooting System
Baron Shooting System 2