What happened? The last devlog was almost a whole year ago, and it was just a small miscellaneous update. What a weird thing to go inactive after.

Truth is, I didn't go inactive. If you were in the discord, you'd know that I still occasionally posted screenshots of the project. But I won't deny that as far as this page goes, the game had basically ceased development. And the reason was simple - I took a break. School started up again and so I decided to take a break for my first semester. Then I extended it a little. Then a little more. Once I forced myself to work on the project, I worked slowly on the stuff I didn't like, which took up most of the work at the time. On top of everything, working while trying to find time for fun stuff and with school and moving and a bunch of other personal things happening... is a bit difficult.

Despite all that, it's kinda hard to go a year without any progress. This isn't even close to everything, this is just what I'm willing to share at the moment.

LORE:

The lore has been immensely worked on. The role of your host, metaphysical properties affected by anomalies, and all sorts of information about how humanity got from where we are now to where it is becomes in the lore has been thought up and will be explored in-game. Here is a map of the world of Errandboy.

Terano is an extremely habitable Earthlike, yet it differs from Earth in many ways. The two most notable differences are the longer days but shorter years, and the higher amount of oxygen in the atmosphere. There are different calendar systems, but the most prominent is the Gydan calendar, an Axellite system adopted and spread by Carus. The year is spread into eight months, and an extra day is added to the week every 46 days. These days are known as Yalsim days by Carusians, and the final days of a year following the sixth Yalsim day are holidays. Every half century a seventh Yalsim day occurs at the end of the year, causing the year to be 287 days instead of 286. This effectively functions as  a leap year. Being born on a seventh Yalsim day is seen as a sign of luck and future success.

While I have exact math regarding things like orbital period and the length of Teranoan days compared to Earth days, none of it is really worth putting here. I might release a document with all of that in the future though.

CURRENCIES:

Currencies are also something that have been implemented into the game. Different countries have different currencies with different values measured by Arbitrary Value Units. The Folknese currency - the "vileur" - is worth 2.1156 AVU, while the Nowapolskan "pedeh" is only a meager 0.0003. Here's a screenshot from back in July of this year (somewhat outdated):

DIALOGUE SYSTEM:

The dialogue system has also seen an overhaul. Text like this is now possible:

As you can see in this video, fonts can change mid-dialogue. This is how language is represented in Errandboy. Due an ability you start with which translates almost everything in each language for you, the way to differentiate between what is being spoken is through fonts. Here is the Lenbevese font compared to the Carusian font:

The dialogue handler has also been revamped to make things like screenshakes, flashes, and sound effects more easy to use. The original system was triggered by weird unicode characters that had widths of zero, but now it is all done through custom tags [].

This is particularly useful for things like color changes and shaky text. This is an outdated video of it (currently, colored text has different shades than in the video, there are different strengths of waviness and shakiness than in the video, the default text is white and the background is black instead of the opposite like in the video, etc), but it shows what it is capable of:

Proper indicators have been added for when you learn knowledge you can use in the future (or in the past).

LOOT AND CUSTOMIZATION:

The game now has a Fallout 4 style looting system. A box appears near your character when you are close to something that you can loot items from, and while the footage I'm showing is outdated (it seems like everything I'm showing is, but I'm too lazy to rerecord older footage) it still gives a good idea on how the system works. Here it is:

(please note that the display which shows the item you picked up at the top of the screen is currently fixed, I'm aware it looks buggy in the video)

The looter works on more than just containers by the way. Anything with loot can potentially be looted (including corpses). 

Also, if you watch the video you may notice that the player character is only wearing underwear! This is because four of your accessory slots have been replaced with a head, torso, leg, and foot slot. These are more than just stat-changing, they actually change how your character looks! You can mix and match clothes and find a fit that fits both your style and playstyle.

Unfortunately, I might have to cut this devlog off here. Almost everything else I have worked on is spoiler related. I can't show new puzzles, new characters, new scenes, so unfortunately you will just have to wait. Sorry!

Here's hoping I don't disappear for another year!