Version 1.3 Launch - Polish and Quality of Life changes + A sequel is coming.

Hello everyone, long time no talk.
The game was last updated at the start of December, and the 1.2 version was likely going to be the last update. However, I have some big news to the 2 people who have played this game, which you probably already know based on the title of this thread. Don't worry, we'll get back to that. First, let's talk about what 1.3 brings:

Surprisingly a high number of changes, despite a low amount of work put into this update.

I have implemented a few plugins developed by the RPG Maker community. So a special thanks to Yanfly and their "YEP" plugins, and Porgy for his "POR Asset Encrypter".

What does this mean for you, the player?

A huge list that I don't think I could ever explain everything, but I'll give a brief summary of the obvious (and not so obvious).

• All art is now fit to the screen appropriately. This includes the main menu (unfortunately stretched to fit) and battle backgrounds no longer have weird tiling.
• The actors on the battle screen are now aligned appropriately. This means, in combat, Fidel is no longer floating way up at the top-center of the screen.
• Enemy A.I. has been improved. Enemies will now engage Fidel more competently. This has had the side of effect of increasing the combat difficulty. Standard enemy encounters are only marginally more difficult. They are more likely to use their special attacks, however since their health pool is relatively low, the player is still highly likely to kill the enemy before they use their special attacks. However, bosses have had a significant increase in their difficulty since they will now more competently use their abilities. But I play tested it on the normal difficulty and can report that the bosses are not only more fun thanks to the added challenge (got my palms sweating a little bit), but they are definitely possible, even at the expected player level (no need to grind).
• Speaking of combat, combat speed has been increased greatly; from the logic behind showing damage, to how quickly combat is engaged, to the speed of animations. Everything flows much quicker now.
• Menus have also been adjusted to be more modern and more appealing. This includes the player menu, the save menu, and the post-combat readout screen. All three of these changes are thanks to Yanfly's plugins and for the most part, I did nothing to make these changes other than drag and drop the necessary plugins into the project file.
• Along with the new coat of paint for the menus, I also implemented Caz Wolf's icons to help give a more clear and interesting definition to all icons in the game, including item and status effect icons.
• Some additional polishing was done on my end as well, such as cleaning up a few more typos, fixing a couple of misplaced tiles, and adding in a custom (and more thematically fitting) "buzzer" UI sound which is played when the player tries to perform an action in the menus that cannot be performed, such as trying to cast a skill the player does not have MP for.
• File encryption has been employed as well, this is where Porgy's plugins come in. This is really only to keep the honest folks honest. Due to some of the music files I used in the game, I don't want to distribute those (yet) and so I would like to prevent - if at all possible - the distribution of those certain music files. Not to mention, if you like listening to the music contained in the game, the Audio Collection file is available to download for free and includes versions of some of the songs presented in a more "listening-friendly" way (such as fading out the track for listening purposes, instead of cutting off the track suddenly for looping purposes).
• Likewise, I had 0 downloads of the Mac version of the game throughout its life, and I do not own a Mac to be able to troubleshoot any problems, so I would prefer to no longer support this platform, so the Mac version has been removed (and also I didn't deploy a 1.3 version either).

I believe that covers all the changes, if I have forgotten any then I'll update this post later.
Originally when I had made Fidel & The Maker's Trial, I wanted to just learn how to use RPG Maker and making a pretty simple game using just the vanilla functions within the software, therefore plugins were always outside the scope of Fidel & The Maker's Trial. However, taking on my newest RPG Maker project (more on that in just a moment), I decided that it was okay to use some of the most basic plugins to polish some of the rough edges in Fidel & The Maker's Trial. Although there are numerous plugins available within Yanfly's collection, among other developers, I decided I would prefer to keep Fidel & The Maker's Trial as close to vanilla as possible while using only a select few plugins to - as mentioned - just polish the rough edges. Therefore, I chose not to go overboard and completely redirect the game, instead leaving it 'pure' if you will.

My experience using plugins has come from the next exciting announcement...well, not really exciting to anyone besides myself because hardly anyone played this game. On my road to making my magnum opus, I've taken another detour from learning other engines to come back to RPG Maker to test...I guess you could call "meta mechanics" of the game I hope to one day make (probably a decade from now). In other words, the game wide systems. RPG Maker by default contains simple enough tools to execute a few ideas I have had that I want to implement in my magnum opus, and therefore, I have been hard at work on creating a sequel to Fidel & The Maker's Trial.

THE SEQUEL:

Fidel & The Big Decision (title subject to change) will improve on the confidence system built in Fidel & The Maker's Trial, as well as add a more fleshed out experience, making it a bite-sized game, rather than a short technical demo. The scope of the project is still small, though if I had to give a rough estimate, I'd say it's planned to be about 4x larger than Fidel & The Maker's Trial. It will include a town with NPCs, multiple levels (which can be approached in any order), new combat mechanics, and a refined confidence system (plus a handful of great new songs written by me!) Using a very rudimentary method, I've also created the ability for players to carry over some progress from Fidel & The Maker's Trial (don't over think it, it's like...super rudimentary). So if you didn't play or complete Fidel & The Maker's Trial, make sure you do so before the release of the sequel!
If you want to watch my progress as I build this game, I stream my work on it once a week. Typically I use restream to stream myself to multiple platforms, including Twitch and Youtube. However, recently Restream has been giving me troubles, so I've mostly just focused on streaming at Youtube. You can find me here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtjh_cDxm2GJIHFEOfOKzYg
or here:
https://www.twitch.tv/nolanalighieri
(I also keep the stream archives public on my Youtube channel, so if you want to get caught up on what progress I have made already, you are welcome to watch the stream archives.)

Thanks for sticking with me on this road! I hope you enjoy the new update and look forward to my upcoming game!

p.s.
Decided not to change the spelling. It's Fidel, pronounced "Fiddle" and not Fidel like Fidel Castro.