Ricardo recaps our April Fools' joke and shows progress on beautifying and cluttering levels he works on.

• Welcome Natascha (human concepts) and Drew (animator) to the team.

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Look for the egg, we've hidden one in this week's dev diary beside loudness metering and grotesque sand statues.

• Us devs have Son of Nor now in our Steam library for testing. It's a cool feeling seeing one's game there.

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We're working on the game's intro. The story of Son of Nor has never been told in this way before.

• We've overhauled the havoc spell. The spell that happens when all 3 elements (wind, fire, essence) are combined.

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This week there's progress on a level we showed some time back as well as the last temple, the essence temple.

• Our last story time dev diary was well received and we reached rank 7 on IndieDB, which is always a nice feeling.

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Another look at strange places Son of Nor popped up on the internet. And a lot of MUSIC!

• I got some more Google Alerts this week about places on the internet where Son of Nor suddenly appeared. I like to investigate these as they sometimes are quite funny. Cracker sites advertising to have a crack / serial / activator for Son of Nor (a game that isn't even released yet and only has demo versions that don't need any crack) are a source of humor. Places claiming to have lifetime licenses (what a funny choice of words) or instructions that say you have to make sure to install all the software components for the game to work (which tells me that maybe more pieces of software get installed than you actually want).

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Every day we are closer to final release so we concentrate more on polishing everything, this goes from effects to even voices!

• Dev Diary #80! A new anniversary! Will we reach #100 before final release?

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More polishing and Son of Nor now starts to feel like a "game" even for us! Some NPCs talk about bananas.

• It's hard for us to think of Son of Nor as a playable game as we're working on so many ends, we're constantly seeing behind the scenes, we're testing little pieces all the time so that we literally don't see the big picture. There's a nice saying in German: Wir sehen den Wald vor lauter Bäumen nicht mehr (not to see the wood for the trees). But now that we play through the game in bigger chunks, everything comes together, also for us. Which is really cool to see. Son of Nor is fun :)

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Follow Chris as he creates monster sounds. And behold the "Child of Nor" super suit™ for kids!

• We tweaked the plant shader. Trees now gently wave in the wind. No more spastic dancing. There were some funny side effects along the way.

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Son of Nor BETA is out! We announced a great distribution deal this week and new spells have landed!

• Our closed beta has arrived! Beta backers: download and test the game!

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Play some game jam games for free this week :)

• Son of Nor Closed Beta is out! People downloaded their beta on Steam and are playing the game.

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