From the desk of the Majicrafter,

I normally post this after a build session but I started work immediately on my kitchen project (project battle), which now includes the enemy having the ability in inflict poison damage and summon sharks into battle. It also includes a change in the source code to draw objects on a grid. so that objects can be quickly and automatically assigned their position by the battle engine, rather than me having to hand code the x.y position, or even the grid position for each object.  object.grid_number, array, check free grid, plop. Easy peezy. Once I have added all the special effects and abilities, I am going to build the combat_ai function and I plan to make it very clever by giving it a set of parameters based on what objective it means to achieve, deciding who to attack and how to attack. I plan to make the NPC's equally clever. That will be the longest and most arduous of the coding, I think. This engine will be ported over to Starlight the Black Bid Tales when I am ready to begin that project again.

Beyond the End got side images, and some GUI enhancements. I had intended to expand the Mermaid city storyline but alas my software wants to be very inconsistent as the the definition of a "Mershark" and despite many many attempts and what amounts to hours of promting, I'm having a hard time getting that scene pieced together. I will try again later today but it really through a wrench in my roadmap last night. 
The sykelab area has one new map because I updated the NPC interaction there with the new interaction code. The mapshould have been there anyway, but I was just jumping to the interaction. You should now be able to interact with the NPC at your leisure. I'm going to try and have at least one path, start to finish. That's probably gonna be mermaid city because the Villa requires every other path to be completed before that story can be finished but I have all the story paths drafted and ready to rock it's just  matter of coding them in and a whole lot of renders.fig. A Project NBS, notice the improved hit bars for enemies and status trackers. A lot of the very cool stuff about this update is in the code itself. OH. forget to mention, the third icon from the right is the female player character from Beyond the End!. "ELSA IX" All of these characters are featured in Beyond the End. :)