Grüezi! As stated in the title, there are minor spoilers of the first Zone in Nausea - this post assumes you have played through and completed the original English demo vesion uploaded back in December 2021. Thank you :)

I just wanted to provide a bit of a small update on the full game's progress as well as a state of affairs. Nausea is still in active development, and I'm realistically shooting for a summer release. The current build is as of this post is v0.2.112! The first half of Zone 2 is finally done (or at least, the most important parts ;) after ~6 months of unforseen external complications getting in the way of development. For multiple reasons I have taken more time away from my actual job to focus on myself, which includes working on Nausea, and as such I have gotten in 5 more hours of work on the game this January than I did last January. (I was even on holiday for a while!)

So, what have I worked on since I published my demo and what has changed? Firstly, and most importantly, I have reworked how I want save points to work. I have split save points (or nests) into 4 unique categories. Currently, there are only 2 kinds of save points: Azurebird nests and Flamecrow nests. As explained in the new(ish) tutorial (somehow I forgot to explain this feature in previous builds of Zone 0), Azurebird (blue) nests allow you save as well as recover health and trauma; Flamecrow nests (red) do the same with the added bonus of giving access to the world map and the other Zones in the game. Azurebird nests could be found periodically placed throughout the Zones after major checkpoints, and Flamecrow nests could only be found at the end of a Zone. I had already decided way back in 2019 that I did not want players to rely on save-scumming, as it would mitigate any difficulty and lessen the impact of decision making and, most importantly, ruin combat entirely; this was a problem in Mortis Ghost's game OFF (a game which I adore deeply, and has inspired much of my own game), where he was very generous with the save points (which also allowed you to entirely recover your party without a limit, free of charge), to the point that selecting "Auto" and letting the CPU do all the work in encounters was the best strategy in the long-run (I actually made my own personal version of the game where several save points were removed or just didn't allow you to heal). However, I may have leaned too hard into control freak territory, so I completely reworked the save point system to be a little less unforgiving (but still removing save-scumming), and also to reward exploratory players who keep a watchful eye and inquisitive mind as they play ;)

The new nests are as follows:

• Topasmöwennest (Topazgull Nest): They are yellow and orange. These allow the player to save their progress, but only a maximum of 1 time. They're often hidden but are relatively common if you look hard enough, with at least one spaced out in some areas (generally where Azurebird nests used to be).
• Smaragdschwanennest (Emeraldswan nest): They are dark and forest green. These allow the player to save progress but only a maximum of 3 times. They are uncommon and are always hidden.
• Azurvogelnest (Azurebird Nest): They are sky and light blue. They allow the place to recover HP and trauma only twice, but do allow the player to save limitlessly. There are only 2 of these nests per Zone.
• Flammenkrähennest (Flamecrow nest): They are red and dark orange. They allow the player to recover and save limitlessly, as well as travel between the Zones. There is only one per Region (so, there's only like 4 or 5 in the entire game).

Hopefully, this new 4-nest system reduces the amount of players who just repeatedly visit save points to recover health instead of using, like, actual healing items. This, essentially, has fixed the one annoying section in Minendorf, where you save in Tunnel 5, and then proceed to have to fight various extremely difficult enemies and make a significant amount of progress without saving. It has also fixed a couple issues present within previous builds of Zone 2; this Zone is supposed to be a decent bit more difficult so the method that worked for making Zone 1 not so easy breezy ended up making Zone 2 extremely difficult unless you bought like 30-40 Bandages and healed every other turn in combat.

I have also reworked a lot of the sprites! Various faceset and charset placeholders were finally given actual artwork, some enemy artwork was modified slightly, and of course, a lot of edits have been made to the chipsets and objects found in-game, but honestly these are not quite interesting or worthy of going into detail. (Most were just changing a couple pixels or shifting a box 1 pixel to the left.) I think the biggest change to the game's graphics was replacing that awful "dark grey with uneven black boxes" menu with a much more lovely stylised one!

As I'm sure you can also tell, I have custom symbols for health, trauma and the party members' levels! Health is a heart (duh), trauma is actually a rune made up of 4 other runes (nyd, ræd, þorn and hægl; need, journey, thorn and hail, respectively), and level is the Sedgeford rune (which we still have no idea what it means or what sound it represents)! The latter two are actually custom symbols I made in one of the engine's files (not the game files). This means that these symbols can also be used in text!

Looks like those weren't the only runes I added :D

As well as all that, I have worked on creating more varied interactons with NPCs (e.g. more characters with randomised dialogue). I have also worked quite a bit on trying to make the results of the player's actions a bit more obvious. In Minendorf there were a few situations where NPCs and objects would change depending on how far they progressed or whether certain actions had been taken. While, yes, I encourage players to be more attentive to the world of Nausea, some of these things were pretty unnoticeable even for playtesters I had explicitly told of these changes.  A consequence of this is also trying to make the world feel more lively and lived-in; ironically, I do not want the world to feel like it entirely revolves around the player's and Giulia's actions, even though that's kind of the point of the entire story. I have taken a lot of care to increase NPCs' awareness of events, even to the point of actually including several side quests. (Much like the pickaxe one in Zone 1! Yeah, I bet you had no idea that stray bit of dialogue was actually a whole side quest. That's probably because I forgot to actually, uh, put it together and make it work... oops. It works now, though!)

I also added some new combat animations and fixed a few old ones. Notably, I made all of the runes fly to the right of the screen, so you can actually see the runes for a moment (instead of going left and immediately disappearing off-screen).

Lastly, I have made a couple new tracks for the game :) They are mostly for Zone 2 onward, since all of their music is just slightly altered versions of the Minendorf tracks. The main part of Zone 2, Gala, will retain its modified version of "Minendorf (Draußen)" (aptly named "Gala (Draußen)"), but its interior theme (currently a slowed-down version of "Gala (Draußen)") will be replaced with its own "Gala (Innen)" soundtrack. The same goes for most areas that (re)use "Du gehörst nicht"; I may make a Zone 2 version of the track, or I might just make individual tracks with a similar theme for each area that uses it currently. I will not show these new tracks just yet, as they will be eventually uploaded to my Bandcamp page and YouTube channel, along with my other music projects.

This should be all of the things worth mentioning that I've changed since dropping the demo a couple months ago. As of writing this I still have yet to publish the German version; audiences are obviously a little different and are receptive to different kinds of media. I feel like more of my community would be in the Anglosphere, but as German is my (m)other tongue, it just doesn't feel right to leave them out! Also, just in case, I have started working on a localisation glossary for various important terms between English, German, French and Russian. This will not be published until after the full release of the game, however. (I would like versions in those languages, and while I am fairly proficient in both, I am not a native speaker of French or Russian, so for now I will use my linguistics knowledge to create a comprehensive "guide" on translating/localising Nausea as I go!)

Thank you for reading, if you have made it this far. If you have played the demo, I hope you have so far enjoyed the game. It is my first, and so it will not be perfect, but I have worked on it alongside various projects in the last 5-6 years, so I have become very experienced and familiar with RPG Maker 2003. I will try to provide more updates from now on, now that I have more free time. Until then, feel free to leave feedback for me via the comments on the demo download page or via my business email(s)!

Bis dann,

JudyBudy