Hello, soldiers!

It's Horie again—and today, I have the honor of presenting another update! Our topic is "travel," meaning we're going to discuss the world map, exploration, and the many secrets you might stumble upon.

World Map Travel

The world map is where our players will spend most of their time planning their next action(s), so I needed to make things very accessible.

As you can see in the image above, however, we intend to use a "fog of war." This is only during the game's initial stages—and is meant to represent Deegan's limited knowledge of the outside world. Simply put, we feel that doing this creates a sense of mystery and puts players in the character's shoes!

(Pictured: An image from the debug version, to showcase the full world map. As always, this may not reflect the final game!)
During their journey across Ashird, players will be able to freely choose their destination—or they can follow hint points! The most important of these icons is for story scenes, which will be represented by red ones on the map.

Speaking of…

Hint Points

Hint points are intended as guides for the player. Basically, they're meant to whisper "Come closer… You might want to see this." For this purpose, we've included three basic kinds: ones for character events, ones for quests (including sidequests), and ones for story progression.

Green - Character events, which give you a chance to learn more about everyone and their individual stories. These also trigger all romantic / close relations, so choose them wisely! After all, it's better not to try dating everyone at the same time…


Yellow - Quests—which are given by major characters, given by NPCs in towns, accepted at guilds, or unlocked as you go through the story.

Each story mission and sidequest has a difficulty level from 1 to 5 stars, and gives an appropriate reward!

Red - As described before, these are some of the most important points on the world map. Each time you select one, you'll delve a little deeper into War of Ashird's story.

Beware, though! When you see two story points, each denotes a different route—meaning you won’t be able to go back. Please, remember to keep that in mind as you progress through the game!

Towns

When you select a city on the world map, you will notice an "explore town" option at the bottom. By selecting it, you can enter the city and see all it has to offer!

This can be used to look for sidequests, find secrets in the game world, and visit various buildings (including shops, the guild, and so on)..

(Pictured: Town exploration as it appears in the game's demo.)
To show our progress, here are some screenshots from build 200324 (last year):

(Pictured: Town exploration, ver. 200324)

(Pictured: Town exploration, ver. 200324)
I hope you, like us, feel these changes are going in the right direction! Still, I realize that there are some things we can do to improve our players' experiences—and we hope to use your feedback on the demo to make those things a reality.

As always, never hesitate to leave comments below. Our team loves hearing your feedback!