Carter here, and holy moly! It's been a long time since our last update! Over a year, in fact! Despite what you might think, we've been pretty busy. The second phase of the Alpha test was a great success and a lot of bugs were found and patched out. Here's some of other stuff that has happened in the past year:

The entirety of the main story (minus some visual flair) is fully playable and takes about 6 hours to complete if you rush through it. A little bit more balancing will inevitably need to be done.

The day/night system, including 4 days in a week, is now fully functional. Instead of working in real-time, it relies on counting how many times players go from certain maps to others, saving an absurd amount of processing power.

Every city/town exterior has been completely mapped out. The interiors are currently being worked on and will hopefully be done within the next month or two. 

All of the art is done. Icons, characters, enemies, everything. There will likely be a few things that need to be created later that we forgot, but as far as we know it's all there. The big thing left to do is add the animation files to their respective weapons/magic.

With a new dungeon designer on our team, multiple dungeons have been designed, with more on the way! Dallin Gregson, who you may recognize as doing a LOAD of voices in the game, took up this job as well which we are very happy about. Let's hope he sticks around and doesn't follow the dungeon designer curse (knock on wood).

A new voice actor for Locke was hired as the original one unfortunately didn't fit his character anymore. The new actor is Ethan Van Valkenburg and he did an amazing job in his VA session!

Last, but certainly not least, an entire wiki was created by myself laying out every single NPC's schedule, backstory, quests they give out, what towns they reside in, their relationships, so on and so forth. This has helped TREMENDOUSLY in building the game world in the actual engine and it will only continue to help when I start developing the quests and NPCs.

As for the future, our plan is to have the very first beta test of the game out by the end of the year. The beta will include the entire game minus visual flourishes such as lighting and the main focus of the beta will be finding bugs with the quests. Our second beta will come soon after that with heavy focus on refining and balancing the battle system and adding the aforementioned eye candy. The first beta will have a limited amount of slots available for testers, whereas the second one will be a bit more open. Be on the lookout for details when they come!

It can be very hard for me to work on the game sometimes if I'm being honest, because it has gotten to the point where I'm always working on the same thing with little variety. Some dates of when I hope things can be done may not come to fruition, but such is the case when you're one man trying to develop an entire open world game. I have definitely had a lot of help, but almost everything done in the RPG Maker engine is on me. Sometimes, the only thing that keeps me going is realizing how much money and time I and others have spent on this game. Forgive me for being sentimental and informal, but I also cannot wait for people to play this game. It has long been a dream of mine to create something truly large in scope like this and it is the only time I have gotten close. God's Disdain currently has about 240 maps in it and I've only scratched the surface, and it's looking to be an incredibly large world that I really do hope people enjoy traversing and getting to know.

Hopefully I'll give you all another update before too long to let you know how things are going, but in the meantime you can follow our new Twitter account @UselessTorch for quick little updates and, if I feel like it, retweets of other RPG Maker and indie projects that I enjoy.

See you soon,
Carter Prescott