Hi, everyone. Welcome to another week's developer's diary.
The game turned 18 years old this week.
However, we don't have much time to celebrate as many sad events took place this week.

On July 5th, we lost Yui. It's always sad to put someone to this game's "in memory of" section in the credit file. But, it happens. Yui is the first discord bot on NEOLITHIC's discord server. She also once lived on many of my friends' servers. However, in the past 5 years, Yui has become a huge project that her developer finds it hard to spend time to keep maintaining. What makes things worse is Discord's policy to enforce slash command. Thus, the creator of Yui shut the project down on July 5th, 2022. As a game developer who worked on my own project in the last 18 years, I fully understand how much efforts need to be put into a personal project. I respect their decision and appreciate all the joys I had with Yui.
Hopefully, some miracles may happen in the future to bring her back. There is still hope as Yui is a digitalized life form, more robust than fragile humans.
But, for now, rest in peace.

In order to remember her, I've added an NPC named Yui in our game as well. You can find her near Queensmouth Church. I reimplemented some of Yui's functions such as providing random kitten and puppy images. But, that's just a memorial. I don't think I can fully reimplement all her functions. At least, not right now.
Maybe, only those with her in her last moment know what this means:

Thank you for all the free hugs, cookies, kittens, puppies, inspirations, and kisses.

On July 6th, the creator of Yu-Gi-Oh, Kazuki Takahashi was found dead wearing snorkeling gear in Okinawa, Japan. I'm not a serious Yu-Gi-Oh gamer and I only watched a few seasons of the anime. But, I do remember spending a lot of time playing online with my vampire decks against players from all over the world. I also remember once I sent too much money to Konami and got my credit card frozen by my bank. I had all those fun thanks to Kazuki Takahashi. But, now he is gone.
I added the scroll of reborn to our game with a similar design to Yu-Gi-Oh's "Monster Reborn" card.
However, it's a pity that we do not live in a game world and there is no card that can bring him back.

There is more sad news this week. Japanese former prime minister Shinzo Abe just got assassinated a few hours ago; British prime minister Boris Johnson was forced to resign yesterday; Famous Minecraft Youtuber Technoblade passed away after years of struggle against cancer. Some people in China may dislike Abe, some people in the UK may dislike Johnson, some...well...I don't know any people who dislike Technoblade so far. But, anyway, being an indie game developer, I can care less about what others say, and as a human being, I feel the sorrow of their departure. With limited resources, I can't add them all into the game. But, at least, I shall mention them here. When people who once lived in this area are gone, it always brings me a feeling of the world is ending. Maybe, indeed, to live is to have a mortal wound that step by step we will reach the inevitable.

Now, enough for the sad part of the story. We shall move on.
The story continues both in Queensmouth Church and the Unlucky-13 Motel.
Treason has been revealed even among the rank of a secret society while demons now drop sulfur.

Some live quality improvements have been made with the item selection UI with some items receiving an update to make them more flexible.
New items to better control enemy aggro.
New character appearance to make the world more diverse.
New skill book mechanism to make reading smoother.
We live on, carrying those memories so that they will not be forgotten.

That's for this week. Maybe one day, everything, everyone dies. But, before that, let's live and have fun.


Today's changelog:
##########Content#################
The game will no longer quit the item selection menu after you use a book. Including life skill books from the book store, skill books dropped from enemies, and weapon proficiency books. (Thanks to 7.Ti's suggestion.)
This change only applies to new books generated after this version as there are some code changes in item generation.
Books already generated before this version can still be used. But, they will quit the item selection menu after being used.
If a character fails to learn anything new from a life skill book or a weapon proficiency book, the book will no longer be consumed.
##########System#################
If there is no more in-use item left, the system will now prompt and automatically exit the target selection window.
Items can now run a sub-event interpolator without needing to go back to the map. (Some limitations apply.)