Hoping to make your life's design a bit more dynamic!

on second thought, i somehow am hoping your cryptic message is to be taken more literal, and that the "beast" is stirring up some cake batter, as today i have a wierd craving for cake O.o

Hey Draken, nice update on the front page! Judging from the screen shots, the overall progress looks very good. I'm definitely looking forward to playing this game once it's translated. By the way, I was wondering about two things. In one of the screen shots, the Enchanted Cave has a destruction rate percent category; what exactly does this mean? Does the cave degrade over time if the player does not complete some sort of task? And also, what's with time displayed in the other screen shot? Must a level or something be completed by a set amount of time? Keep up the good work, you guys are great!

Hey Recca! The rooms don't degrade by themselves; however, pesky humans will break into your cave each turn and cause havoc to whatever room they are in. You have to kill them in order to prevent them from causing any damage. Also, each round/turn you have in the cave is timed. This forces the player to have to work pretty darn quickly sometimes in order to get things done. I think you also have a maximum of 10 turns, so If you can't get your objective complete in that time... It's game over.

So how do you complete the game Draken? Do you subsequently get more elaborate caves to protect with more powerful heroes to destroy?

Yeah, I was wondering about that too. Are these Enchanted Caves stages to be completed in order to finish the game or are they just some sort of side quests? By the way, about the intruders that come in to damage the caves; do they appear at random leaving the player with the task of always having to fend them off or can you (the player) somehow beat them all or seal the cave entrance? I'm just curious because this game seems very original in a nice unique way. It's certainly going to be a quite interesting play!

Heh. It's a very original game! I REALLY don't want to spoil too much about the story, so I've been very vague in the past. Let's just say that the game has a several "scenarios" or chapters of the story. Most scenarios appear to have more (sometimes up to 3??) different endings that are based on how you did during the Enchanted Cave part of the scenario, or based on different choices you made during conversations. Each scenario is usually comprised of a "story portion" (in which the story passes and you have access to a town) and an "Enchanted Cave" section (in which you have to heal the earth by channeling energy into the "Dragon Vein").

To be honest, I haven't even gotten halfway through testing/playing the game due to the lack of menus. It was easy enough to chug away the first few scenarios, but it just gets harder and harder when I am expected to master the enchanted cave, but I don't really know what I am doing. The story, though, has gone through one whole edit, but due to its nature (No spoilers here), I really need to play through and edit in order to keep everything sounding right.

Looks great, very nice job!

The intruders are relentess (spawn some groups every 'turn') so you have to fight them, but you can also set Senju patrols or add traps and other defense mechanisms. Make your cave too big and it becomes hard to defend though, make is too small and it's inefficient, good balance is needed. (there is no turn limit btw)

I must have sent Bongo` 7 e-mails last night... Lots of work has been accomplished. There are only a few problem areas left, but I'm sure we can knock them out. I've actually requested some vacation time (I've got five days left!) in the next few weeks with the thought that I'll spend the time hammering out the script and getting the game pretty much fully tested.

Progress continues! I'll show a few more screenies in the next few days

who do I need to bribe to get in on some "beta" patch testing? >.>

Hehe. Anyone who is a big fan can sign up for beta testing.
Well... As long as I don't have to wait 3 months for you to get through the game.