The next release of For One Year approaches! The major content additions, and a handful of smaller changes, are nearly finished. A few more lines of dialog; a couple more pictures; a thorough round of testing or two... and then it's time!

Current estimated release date is in about two weeks, but it could get pushed to three - this has been a sizable update, and there's a lot to test!

Here's what you can expect:
* When continuing a game from a previous version of For One Year, you'll receive a warning that the game might not work 100% correctly (if possible, please finish up any current games before the next release!)
* Made some improvements to game save & load to reduce the number of issues in games played across FUTURE versions of For One Year
* Three new characters to meet: the Ghost, the Historian, and the Thief - see the previous announcement for more!
* Also detailed in the previous announcement: a maximum carrying capacity for the Traveler
* New skills to learn, including four that can only be learned in a library...
* The appearance of the character dialog window has been revamped: every character's name now has a color, to hopefully make it more clear who is speaking at any given moment
* A couple additions to hunting: a new bird, new sound effects, and a surprise...
* Cooking yields a little more food than before
* During cooking, forming larger rectangles of contiguous ingredients increases your maximum food capacity. (How and why? Shh: it's a video game.)
* At least 5 new achievements (one or two might get sneaked in during the next couple weeks)
* Added a couple new villager events
* Removed an old villager event that didn't really fit with the lore of the game anymore, and tweaked the dialog in a few other events to be more consistent with the game's story
* One new song, new sound effects, and lots of new artwork to support all of the above, including seasonal variants for some existing background images
* Some events and dialog segments have been updated to dynamically reflect the current season & weather
* Replaced two of the older/wonkier graphics in the faefolk encounter with new, higher-quality images
* Updated a few third-party code libraries to their latest versions, which should improve overall performance, and hopefully fix a rare crash-on-startup bug that players have been running into now and again!

And that should be it! Pardon if a couple updates got missed, and thanks for waiting while this latest release gets polished to release quality :)

You may recall that in the last update, only one new character was released... it seemed reasonable to expect the same for this release, yet, somehow, THREE new characters are nearing completion!

Of course, the last release introduced the cooking mini-game, and that took a lot of development time! No time spent making mini-games apparently meant more time making new characters! (Seems obvious, in retrospect!)

Though this release won't feature a new mini-game, there are several tweaks to existing mechanics, the most notable being that the traveler now has a maximum amount of STUFF they can carry - food, arrows, and treasures are counted separately, each with its own maximum!

Putting limits on the traveler's carrying capacity has inspired several other changes: new skills to raise those limits, new treasures to find in caves, the ability to drop treasures to make room for new ones, and other related changes.

The release date, and full list of changes, aren't yet known, but things are certainly starting to take form!

Keep your eyes peeled for future updates, thanks for playing, and have fun ;)