It was exactly one year ago today that I released the 0.3.0 version of The Cursed Crown, marking the end of the tech demo phase and the beginning of the beta phase. Honestly, it’s been a rough journey filled with a lot of progress and just as many setbacks. Today, I’d like to present you with the 0.4.0 beta release. There are a lot of little updates here and there (the git commit was for 11,185 files), but here are the most important changes:

• General terrain updates. More decorations and foliage added. Specific note: El’Mi Ruins Vicinity with associated fast travel point.

• Fast travel points at general locations around the overworld island. All currently unlocked for beta testing.

• First major dungeon added: El’Mi Ruins. The initial blockout is complete. As development progresses, decoration, lighting, pickups, and enemies will be added to the ruins to flesh the dungeon out.

• Crafting system implemented. Initial crafting ingredients and recipes are added as well as the crafting table where the crafting can be done. Harvest points have been implemented for the first things that can be gathered in game. These are not currently spread around the world, but there is a temporary station near the initial overworld spawn point where you can test the functionality out. Look for the pink crystal! The art for the crafting “table” itself will be updated as development progresses.

• Updated Unreal to version 5.6.1 and ACFU to version 4.0. This is what took much of my time initially, as quite a few errors popped up and had to be dealt with.

• Behind the scenes things to keep documentation going smoothly and make sure proper design and planning is being done. As things progress further in development, there’s less and less room for sloppy, unplanned development.

Known Issues

• AI enemies have been removed due to issues with upgrading Unreal Engine and ACFU. They will be added back in when they can be fixed.