Okay, today's notes:
1. In terms of the background wood platforms, it is my goal to have a lot of them look more like footholds, but that's harder to do well. I had one thing that overlays on the backgrounds to accomplish that very thing, but it was harder to see because it was a lot less contrast-ful with most backgrounds. That might actually be a good thing in the end, we'll see.
2. In terms of character animations and such, I really am not going to discuss that right now. Seriously. Any attempts to change character animation and such at this point is a literal delay to beta, as there is no time allocated for that.
3. In terms of changing armor and such on parts of your character, or even icons or whatever, please remember that this is a 2D sprite-based thing. That's just not possible for various technical reasons I've talked about before. You can put on whole-body armor or suits, and you can transmogrify yourself into various animals, but there won't be any partial visual swaps. Even just doing the colorized shirts in past versions led to quality drops and to 30+ minutes of added work per character for me, too.
4. In terms of the easyness of the game, it's definitely not easy but all we've shown you are some pretty small starting mobs that we've put in, plus some micro-bosses. Not even any mini-bosses or full bosses yet. That said, this is a game about expeditions: you aren't meant to be one-shot killed by most enemies unless you play up in region levels higher than your civ level; rather, failure is something you arrive at through a series of mistakes on an expedition.
5. In terms of your overall goals, the overlords are certainly one, and Cyborg expressed a lot of that very well. There's also the general goals of building up society and making the NPCs have a happy, healthy environment free from fear and danger, etc. There's also the exploration aspect, which appeals most to me: I want to see a lot of interesting things, find what all there is to craft, etc. There's also a bit of a mystery aspect, where you can work on piecing together the mystery of what happened to the world, as well as other past history threads, through memory crystals and... other mechanics that we're not publicly talking about yet.
6. In terms of interiors needing decoration: yes, given that they aren't decorated at all yet and I said as much, that seems kind of a given.
It's just showing the structure of them, the wall textures, and the hanging lights at the moment. Other furniture, etc, will be forthcoming.
7. When it comes to crafting, I should add that this is your only way to get items of any significance in this game. You won't be finding a Spell Of Awesomeness +4 in some location, ever. Instead you'll find the components to make it, but you'll also be able to make a couple of other variations on that same thing, at your option. Kind of like Ragnarok in FF6, if you know what I mean. So the crafting materials are completely central to the game, and thus they take the place of the sorts of loot drops you'd see in Diablo or Borderlands or similar; meaning that the range of rarity is on the crafting materials in a similar sort of way, so that should feel more familiar. The thing you gain with this shift is flexibility: you don't get stuck with some loot drop that is ostensibly awesome but completely not to your taste. You get a crafting item that can be made into one of a couple of awesome things, one of which is surely to your taste.
8. In terms of the announcement of when beta will be hitting, we should have at least a week's notice. It's looking like it will be in the second week of September (so the 12th through the 16th, somewhere in there), but we'll confirm that better as we get closer.
