Hello there.

Let me start with the important bit.  This update is a full redesign, or at least the start of it.  Because of that, I'm keeping the old version up, since it's more complete, but it also does not reflect my end goals which are more obvious in the new version.

The new version includes:

• A cat who follows you.
• 3 Elemental pools to store your aspects visually.
• NPCs with actual portraits.  (Making use of temporary AI art, I'll make a full post explaining my philosophy on that later, but I'll summarize it by saying I'm being careful with it.)
• A new elemental system, allowing for elementals of all aspects.
• Revamped quest system.

It's been quite awhile since this has been updated, and there's a reason for that.  Some time ago (I refuse to acknowledge when it says the last version was uploaded, it was last summer and that's that.) I made this project over the summer, and then stopped once school started up because I had no time to keep working on it and no assets to make it look consistent or pretty.  (I'm a programmer, not an artist.)
Since then I've worked on a half-dozen other games, and burnt myself out on side-scrolling metroidvanias.  I love the genre, but I can not create one of those alone no matter how hard I try to insist I can.
So in January I decided to do something I'd wanted to do for awhile, take the cat asset pack I got from Epic and figure out how to add it to Elemental Rancher.  I had just pushed out Random Access Memory's first build, and I needed a break because that was just painful to finish.

And then I kept working on Elemental Rancher, because that had just been so much more fun, and it looked so much nicer.  I had new skills, new assets, and I thought I could make it so much better.  I was right, but also I underestimated how little of the old I would end up using.  For the quest system I literally did not look at my old set up for it because I knew it was completely useless.

Now 2 months later, I have replaced some of the most complicated systems, I'm staring at the item system realizing I need to replace it too, and I decided I'm done having nothing anyone can play.  I want to force myself to make playable versions of my game periodically once again, because doing that was one of the most satisfying things when working on Holodefense. 

To finish this post off: Join my Discord.  https://discord.gg/ZkXMZRP3w6  I want to talk to more poeple about what I'm doing as I work.