Hello and welcome to the 28th edition of our quasi-weekly column! There are many news.

Timong finished the chapter, intro/outro and battle music. He also composed a new Scourge main theme. He is now working on generic dungeon and outdoors music. Gabor continued work on the outdoor world, re-added NPCs and the underground part of the headquarters and fixed loads of bugs. I didn't code much but I'm planning on spicing up the minimap quite a bit. Depending on situation, it will show the immediate surroundings, the part of the world where you currently are, or both. In order to prepare this feature, I created an artistic travel map using nothing but Gimp.

Depicted here is the first ingame appearance of the new map (creating a new outdoor region in the map editor):



I also created a more varied set of outdoor ground textures so the landscape doesn't look too boring. Two examples:

Plains of Garmoskod (subtropical)



Geinaror Ridge (alpine)



Today is my 31st birthday, and a present I would really like would be more contributors. No really, we urgently need more contributors. By implementing a massive outdoor world, we have created room for more storytelling, lots of scripted side missions, great eye candy features we would like to try, sharply increased bug and bloat potential and so on. We virtually need more personnel in all areas: Coding, bugfixing, artwork (including handpainted backgrounds and portraits), scripting (Squirrel, C++-like), gameflow, dialogue writing, cutscene direction, playtesting etc.

If you are interested in contributing on an as-time-allows basis or just want to get in touch with the team, you are invited to hang out on our friendly IRC channel (#scourge on freenode).

So, see you on IRC or otherwise, until next week! :-)