Someday I will have cool things to post about the RPG, cool things that have nothing to do with submenus. but as it stands, I've pretty much trapped myself into having to get Equip and party sorting and all of that done for battles to even be able to come into play due to the system setup, but that's not necessarily a bad thing - keeps my focus in one place, and dammit, I'm scatterbrained.

Before we get to the interesting stuff, I'm-a dump some general life happenings down on you all like a vengeful pagan god of portapotties. I got my Rising Stars of Manga entry done, and have my fingers crossed on that, but in the meantime I'm eyeballing Lulu and aim to get something on there before TOKYOPOP even has their results announced. Hurdles involving PDF requirements and my being cheap are making it a bit of a stretch for that to happen, tho, but if you're interested in the story of the RPG at all that will be in the print-only HamstaPowah: Origins books I'm *trying* to do. If that's not enough, the site's been pulling three updates a week to make up for my tremendous slacking while i worked on VYE. That was going well until Monday's page came up, but hopefully I'm having an off day and will have less trouble drawing this crap tomorrow or something.

However, when drawing is crap, coding gets done, and for you all that means - that's right - something you might actually care about. So, without further ado…

That's called a 32-bit PNG, children, and if it looks weird, you should probably ditch your crappy IE or whatever it is you're using for a browser that doesn't blow chunks. : D

Before we get too far, I thought I'd try and pretty up the menus for the update, and remind you all that, yes, the colors can be customized, in the process.

This leaves me sad - I couldn't save these colors to my file because I haven't made a way to back out of menus without resetting rooms yet. That's on the to-do list after getting the menu itself all working and just before battle. Because equipping helps with things like fighting a lot (speaking of which, the equip menu IS started, just not… working. that'll be next time!)

This is where things start changing. the old Tactics menu has been removed, and now that is handled with "Sort," so it's a bit more streamlined and just makes more sense.

Now, when you choose "STATUS," "EQUIP," or "SKILL," you are asked to choose a party member to view the associated information of, rather than just being defaulted to whoever's first. Also, when asked to choose a party member, the pointer defaults to your party leader.

Party leader is a new thing, and once battles are a bit closer to being something worth bringing up here, we'll get into what makes their role so important.

But what's that arrow on the bottom mean? Well, if you hit the down arrow here…

That's right. You can swap pages to view any party member's base stats. Base stats are what you gain every time you level up.

The uncreatively named Base Points allow you to increase your base stats, thus increasing the points you gain in assorted categories as you level up. This becomes vital, and learning where to apply your extra points could prove extremely beneficial - no one stat will make you a powerhouse.

To begin with, everyone's base stats - counting Move, which can't be raise with BP - are at 50 points. Early monsters in the game will have 40, and can come at you thus in assorted levels. As you progress, monsters base stats will increase to counter yours (you are remembering to do that by the time that becomes important, I hope…), so a level 50 monster in one area may end up being just as strong as a level 100 would have been earlier on, simply because their base stats rose.

I've had complaints that this could discourage levelling up, despite my goal of a (at this point) 999 level cap. That said, I am devising ways to encourage players to not only spend BP to raise their stats, but explore the world to find ways to get the most out of it - ways not necessarily on the main path.

Hopefully, i\I'll have more on all of this sometime soon. Honestly, I had to recode a lot of the base structure of the submenu tonight, so I wanted to show off. Heh.