As usual, I am really bad about talking about progress on this project. I somehow managed not to make a single progress report for all of 2023 on itch!? Is that right? How did I manage that? 

Development over the last year has been slow but steady, and in regards to sprites, a lot has happened, so I should talk about it here. I covered it in a few blogs over on RMN so I'm going to paste a lot from there. 

Back when I needed a base for character sprites, I contacted Mirak on RMN who modified a sprite base by Candacis to fit more closely with the style I was going with, and I'm very thankful! He also did the spritework for Lynette and Lluvia the engineer!

Next, I worked with Gabriel Bolduc to bring more of these sprites to life, and he did an amazing job. Just look at all of these! :D

So yeah, the large majority of characters have character sprites now and I couldn't be happier, that's a ton of work already done :DDD

As for tilesets, when I started this project, I thought I'd be attempting to make every single tileset myself. However, less than a year in, I got carpal tunnel, and while I've gotten surgery and am a lot better, I can only pixel so much a day, so I'm looking for ways to help cut down on the pixel workload. 

The first thing I've done is started using Caz's amazing Pixel Fantasy tileset pack to fill in gaps in my own tilesets. For an example of how that looks, here is Hayal Forest Road, where the actual road, boxes, wooden barriers and the guard house are from Caz's pack:

Going forward, while I've gotten a lot of the early game tilesets done myself, I may also be looking for outside help there as well, because I really made too many areas and need more and more tilesets haha. We'll see how that goes :D

With all that out of the way, how much of the game is actually done?  Somewhere around the 40-50% mark, I'd say. It's unlikely that I'll be finishing this year, but 2025 is possible :D Thanks for joining me on the journey, and I really hope I won't take over a year for another update (sorry again about that XD;;;;)