This is an unexpected turn of events: things are getting done, at a very good pace no less!

Anyway, the battle charsets for the first two playable characters (the ones in the screenshot from earlier) are done, quite a bit sooner than I anticipated, and I even finished an entire SET of weapon graphics, so all the disk-based weapons are essentially done for the rest of the game. That means that as far as battle charsets and weapons go, I'm halfway done for the content of the Demo!--Wait, I just remembered that some status ailments need custom graphics... those won't be in the Demo, though, so it's not really an issue right now.

As for everything else, the enemy graphics are done, and the enemies for the second region need to be programmed. The mapping, which I'm waiting until later to do, is still very much incomplete, especially for that second region (though the elevator in the screenshot is done and works perfectly). The biggest thing standing in the way of that part is that I need to make one chipset from scratch and modify at least four others, a part of the process I'm not looking forward to, in all honesty. It'll be worth it, though. The world presented in this game is going to be... just epic. I'm not sure I can quite describe what I have in store yet. All I can say right now is that the later parts of the game will completely blow away anything I've done before on BZPower.

On a mechanical note, The first battle system just got a hitch, but I think it can work to my advantage, because while it means I have to program each character's attributes for this system separately, it allows for some continuity. I can't explain right now, but you'll get it once you see the game yourselves.

By the way, I'm really hoping for a March/April release date for the first Demo. It might have to get pushed back until May, but I'm really hoping for sooner than later, but there's too many factors at play right now to accurately say when it'll get finished.