What's new in the latest build?

For those of you who want more detail than a simple list can offer, this one's for you.

Project Red updated to Version 1.7 yesterday and today I'll be going over as much of the new stuff as I physically can.  As usual I'll try to tackle things in an order that lines up with how you'll experience things.  So starting off with...!

When booting up a new game, you will no longer have the option to skip to chapter 5.  Now, I imagine some people will dislike this change, but hear me out.  If I kept that feature, you would be skipped all the way to the Crow enemies, with no understanding of the new skill tree, how skills have been tweaked, and with no skill tree accessible nearby.  Meaning you'd likely die in your first encounter.  While I COULD give you a bunch of affinity and skills as well it kind of defeats the whole purpose of your choices defining what skills you have access to.  You'd also by default miss a lot of the new stuff.  So it just felt like a really bad idea to keep that option available.

And that's just about it for the major stuff.  There's lot of small tweaks like additional dialogue or voice acting, and of course Scarecrow is playable in the story itself and brings unique mechanics to the table for his brief stint as a party member.  Lots of visual updates like more corpses in Broomhill.  New items, new events, new enemies and enemy placements.  But going over all that would be a little extra.  So if you want the full list of changes do check out the actual change log post.

I'm already hard at work on the games second chapter which is what the next update will focus on.  I also intend to update the games icons at long last and start including proper explanations for all the statuses and effects in game.  We're reaching the demos final form now.  Again I appreciate everyone's support and all the kind words.  I'm liking this trend of updates every other month so I think I'll try and stick with that schedule.  So hopefully you'll be playing chapter 2 in April.  There might be a patch if any game breaking bugs are discovered but I'm hoping this build will be much more stable thanks to my extensive playtesting.  Well that's it for now.  Hope you're enjoying the game and I'll catch up with you all later!