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Good morning all,

I hope everyone has been well and has had a good Christmas (or whatever you celebrate this time of year). Today is the last day of 2025 and with that comes the close of the quarter. But more importantly, a new EXCOM release! Also please accept the smoking crab image instead of usual pixelization of medieval art.

This update adds in some more baseline systems into EXCOM, such as;

•Lockpicking (Logicpicking) System

•Containers System

•Weather System

•2-D, 4-D, and 8-D Player Sprite Movement

•Dialogue Updates

•And more!

Now of course just having systems in place and not doing anything interesting with them is equivalent to have done nothing at all but scroll on your phone. For Logicpicking and Containers there is a natural synergy there so that's taken care of. But for Weather not much is being done on that front for now. I hate to say this line but a future update will take advantage of the Weather system - so for now please understand that time was tight. But we'll put a cap on EXCOM update talk for now. Please watch the Youtube update video for a more in-depth talk.

This time of year is a very festive one, so please party responsibly! Don't be like Billy Joe. Have a great New Year's!

All the best,

Ite

Hi all,

I've noticed a minor error in EXCOM Version 1.1.0 whilst working on Version 1.2.0 so I'll walk you through on how to fix the problem. To make the ETCS a bit more logical, I was streamlining the names for certain commands. One of those was Alter Player Health (APH), which originally had the command name of ADP (Alter Delta Player, or something similar). I also added some more functionality to it. Long story short, I had forgotten to update the item named "Minor Health Gain Potion" with this new language.

To get the item to work correctly, you will need to alter the item's Inventory Use Effect with the correct command. To do so, go to the $Stats worksheet, then scroll to the right until you find the item's current effect of "trg$ADP;5". Delete that command and replace it with the command "trg$APH;F;5" (without the quotation marks). After you do that, you're good!

Should I find another example of something like this, or some weird little bug I forgot to delete, I'll roll out a hotfix. But in the meantime, I think any weird quirks can be handled by you guys. You're smart, I believe in you!

All the best,

Ite

Hi all,

It's been a little bit since I last posted something. A while ago on my YouTube account I gave an update in regards to EXCOM. But in case you don't follow me on there (you should by the way, I'm great - ignore the fact I'm on break), or history is a natural enemy of yours, I've decided to do quarterly updates for EXCOM. This way I have time to flush out ideas and really workshop them, and you guys get the ability to have some standardization on content being drip-fed to you. Depending on how a lot of things are going, I may need to skip a quarter here or there. But I'll always do my best to make a post about EXCOM every quarter regardless of what's happening.

With that said, this announcement is here to say that Version 1.1.0 of EXCOM has been released! Please review the changelog, either within the release page or at the bottom of the system guide, for some details on what has been changed. However, some general highlights include:

•Updated NPCs to load from data text files instead of being persistent tables within EXCOM.

•Added ability to have maps load from other, external Excel sheets. 

•Helper tool has been updated.

•Variety of combat updates.

•5 new ETCS have been added.

•And more!

I'll want to remind everyone that we're still very much in Version 1 of EXCOM. I am actively trying to make sure everything is all set and ready before I start ballooning "content" for this game. And, just so everyone has the same mentality as me, I consider Version 1 as the "base". I don't really have any intentions on adding a lot of new things until I have the actual game side of things all set, or at least mostly all set. As my coworkers have made fun of me about, I talk a lot using examples instead of being direct (which is something I've been trying to fix but to no avail). So the best way I can describe my stance is that I'm trying to dig this puddle deeper before I make it wider. Because I think the last thing anyone wants is a game that's extremely large with absolutely nothing to do inside of it.

Version 2, in my mind, is when content will really be added to EXCOM. Now, that isn't to say Version 2+ will be only content updates and no system updates. But just that you'll start to see... well, content added to EXCOM. But that's all future talk. I have absolutely no plans on releasing anything like a Version 2 any time soon.

With all that said, please review the update and maybe play around with some of the sandbox things if you feel up to it! Thank you taking the time to read all of this, and for being even minutely interested 

All the best,

Ite

Hi.

First introductions are always rough. You kinda just grab onto the other person and just beam all the important information about yourself directly into their brain, and you hope at least a quarter of it sticks in their brain. And then a quarter of that at least meshes well with their own life enough for them to like you. I think there's a lot I can say at this moment but what probably matters most at this threshold (and while I have your barely piqued interest) is the thing that brought you here: EXCOM.

EXCOM, short for Excel Commander, is an RPG I've been making in Excel for the last little bit of time. The idea started way back in March 2023 (I know, I am slow at programming) when I started to really use Excel full time at my job. I used Excel in college, sure, but that was nothing more than making a few SUM() and IF() commands to speed up some labs I had to do, with the occasional graph tossed in there to make things spicy. I didn't even know that Excel had the ability to handle some coding through VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) in the Developer menu until I started my job. I started this project as the ultimate novice.

I'm not a Computer Scientist or even a Big IT Guy. I'm just a low level jobber who learned how to make the magic rock do cool things by complete trial and error, and with Google helping me out when I could form questions about what little I knew. But I kept at it and things kept coming to me, and I kept coding them as best as I could. I would go back and try to touch up old code when I learned something new, I tried to implement new ideas of how to handle the same task, I did everything I really could do.

And things just kept up like that to now! I'm still not done. This release is basically nothing more than a Pre-Alpha (despite the 1.0.0 name I slapped onto it), a debug room, a proof of concept, an idea. But this silly little game idea has grown far more than I could imagine and made me do things I wouldn't have done otherwise. I mean, it made me make this website (side note: this is my first time actually making a website, so I hope it's alright!). Hell, it even made me start streaming again and doing more creative things, like completely redesigning my streaming model. 

I could keep going, but I think I'll stop here. Please look around, and thank you for even visiting this site. I'm always open to suggestions and at some later point I'll try to figure out a way of handling incoming critiques or suggestions about EXCOM. So, for now, please take care and stay safe.

All the best,

Ite