It’s been a long time since the last update. That’s partially down to the graphical upgrade taking longer than we thought, so we’re moving the new graphics into a later update. That way you won’t have to wait for other new features, bug fixes and polish.

More information follows.

Upgrading the graphics is not simply a case of replacing all the art — when you have more detailed art repeated tiles look very bad, and things that didn’t previously need detailed animation suddenly do. A lot of changes to the engine and even the map generation have become necessary. It’s an interesting subject actually and it would make a great topic for another blog post.

We want Lenna’s Inception to be the best that it can be, so we have decided to spend the time to make sure the graphical upgrade is properly supported by the rest of the game.

However, leaving six months between updates is not OK. We don’t want you to wait extra long for improvements that don’t depend on the graphical upgrade. As such, we’ve amended our plan for beta8. Here’s a list of the new things you’ll find in beta8:

• 60 FPS rendering and widescreen resolution support
• Title screens
• Improved menu screens
• In-game controller and keyboard configuration
• Several new items including an axe, a lasso and a chain.
• Alt attacks on high-level weapons such as the Tungsten Sword, Damascus Katana and Silver Bow
• Secret clearings in the trees
• Improved hitboxes and combat feel
• New music tracks
• Also: bug fixes, miscellaneous polish, and improved moddability

But beta8 won’t include the new graphics.

I aim to release this as soon as possible, and a few months later we should have beta9 ready with most of the new graphics in.

If you want, you can see our plan for the updates after that, as well as all the tasks currently in flight, on our trello board.