This is the Friday Developer Diary for Tales of Xdripia: The Seventh Amulet. It covers the week from 15 to 22 October 2026 and is built from the studio's repository history for that period. Official site: talesofxdripia.com.
Last week's diary was about places on the ground in Viridian Tauri. This week the centre of gravity moved to Verdalia: encounter rules, a village layout, localised strings and the build plumbing needed to test all of it on real hardware.
Where the week stands
The honest headline is about branches, not features.
- main received one commit (21 October): Viridian Tauri build steps, renders and references, filed under the project docs.
- A Verdalia integration branch collected 24 commits on 22 October. QA approved it in headless tests.
- That branch is not merged into main and has not been playtested. The first local test deploy on the studio's gaming PC is still pending.
So everything below that comes from the Verdalia branch is work in progress. It passed automated checks, but nobody has played it yet, and we are not showing screenshots or footage of it until it has been verified in-engine.
Built from the studio's weekly summary, 22 October 2026.
Gameplay: encounter rules
Most of the gameplay work this week was about making encounters predictable for the player and for our own tests.
- Random encounters are capped at five enemies. Scripted fights can go up to eight, so set-piece battles keep room to escalate.
- Night encounters follow the sky phase. What you meet depends on where the sky cycle is, not on a separate timer.
- The pollen swarm appears only at night, which makes it the first enemy whose presence is tied to that cycle.
- Enemy names and descriptions are localised, rather than hard-coded in one language.
- Boss defeat state is saved consistently, so a won fight stays won across saves.
The Verdalia branch also adds technique animations in battle. They are part of the untested branch described above.
Art and VFX
Three changes, all practical:
- New enemy VFX scenes, and the KO effects were fixed.
- Tree material fixed. Foliage had been picking up a metallic look; it no longer does.
- A region-map capture tool and a style shader for the maps. The tooling is in; the final map images still have to be captured on the gaming PC.
That last point is a pattern you will see more of: some steps only make sense on the machine the game actually runs on, and they wait for the test deploy.
Levels: the Verdalia village
The Verdalia village layout reached v1.3.1. The work in this version is structural:
- Door exits that lead where they should.
- Building orientation corrected.
- Map visibility handled per zone.
Four Verdalia locations now have names in the build:
- Banco di Bartolo
- Quercia Millenaria
- Mercato Verde
- Casa di Guarigione
These are names in the level, not descriptions of content we have not shown.
Narrative
Verdalia's ambient barks reached v0.11.2, the short lines villagers say as you pass. That version includes a new evening line for the druid at Heartgrove, which fits the week's theme of the world reacting to the time of day.
On the Verdalia branch there are also villager routines and a Verdalia intro cinematic. Both belong to the same not-yet-playtested branch, so we will talk about them properly once they have been seen running in-engine.
UI and localisation
- The area map now shows zone visibility, matching the per-zone rules in the village layout.
- A new on-screen key-hint bar shows the relevant controls.
- Verdalia, enemy and world strings moved into localisation files for Italian and English.
Moving strings out of scenes and scripts is unglamorous, but it is what lets the game ship in more than one language without rewriting content each time.
Audio
No audio changes this week.
Build and QA
This is where a good share of the week went, and it is the reason the Verdalia work can be tested at all.
- The export no longer packs production data or lab scenes. Builds contain the game, not the workbench.
- New QA scripts check random enemy groups and sky phases, the two systems that changed most in gameplay.
- The Verdalia test suite is isolated and registered in CI, so it runs on its own and on every relevant change.
- Off-site backup: a dry run passed; the real copy is still pending.
Known issue
There is a known P2 issue on clean checkouts: the import order of translation files. It is scheduled to be fixed right after the test deploy. We mention it because a diary that only lists wins is not much use.
What comes next
The next step is concrete: deploy the Verdalia branch locally on the gaming PC, play it, and see whether what passed in headless tests holds up with a person at the controls. After that come the translation import fix, the final region-map captures and, if the playtest goes well, the merge into main.
Next Friday's diary will report what happened on that machine, including anything that did not work.
