Happy Sunday!

This update sees a general lack of shiny new visuals to show off, but there’s plenty of messing around going on under the hood. The battle to get the current content up to a release worthy standard for a playable build continues!

Bug Fixes

There are a TON of these little jerks lurking in the game, and I’ve prioritized a handful for the playable demo.

• A couple obnoxious ones have come about thanks to my fiddling with the day/night cycle:

You can see the drawing of the torch gets weird during a fade-in/fade-out, as well as when you triumphantly pause the screen and hold your newly discovered item aloft (so much for fanfare).

• Hitting treasure chests, especially when they are up against a wall triggers a bug that causes the chest to REFUSE to open unless moved:

• Opening your inventory screen turns off the day/night drawing effect:

• Opening your inventory also turns off the seasonal check for future rooms that you transition into. You can see the second room deciding it’s just gonna draw ALL the seasonal tile layers… because it hates me:

• Certain (and only certain, of course) falling hazards ignore your shield (game needs hardhat):

• If you have a shield equipped when entering and exiting a doorway, things get real screwy:

• Blood particles, when hitting a solid that can potentially move, don’t move along with the solid object they’ve landed on:

Minor Improvements and Fixes

Things aren’t all doom and gloom, though! Here are a handful of tweaks and fixes I’ve made this week:

• I can’t remember if I’ve addressed this already, but you can now grab one-way ledges (the background platforms you can jump up through and land on top of. This certainly makes traversal feel better and more fair:

• Picking up liftable objects and enemies is faster. Again, a minor tweak, but it feels a LOT better and less sluggish. The minor speed adjustment feels like it improves survivability, since you are vulnerable during this animation:

Here’s the slow lift:

… and the lift after the tweak:

• The new Clingjaw enemy has been fixed — segment spacing has been improved, and when the head and segments meet a solid object, they are easier to see — attacking segments did not carry the damage over to the “head”, and the enemy now dies correctly:

• Biome detection has been simplified when on the overworld. The pink ovals you see on the map used to set the active biome when the player object collided with them. Now, the active biome is set when the player collides with a random encounter based on proximity to the pink object. This cuts down on collision detection on the map:

• Weighted pressure plates used to be… um… yeah. See the before and after for yourself:

Save System

I’ve started to plot out how this thing is going to work now that I have enough junk to track, like:

• certain doors and gates opened/unlocked

• cinematics and story events completed

• quests completed

• bosses killed

• character level, inventory, general progress tracked

• certain items found
  … and a host of other things. This is a daunting prospect, but one I’m slowly getting to grips with and figuring out.

Playable Build Checklist

In addition to all of the previously mentioned tasks and issues, here’s a general rundown of everything I’d like to have completed and/or addressed in the next couple weeks so you all can give it a try!

• finish first NPC village including (finally) a vendor

• finalize dialogue bits and interaction with the NPCs in the mining prison

• GUI improvements

• redesign UI interaction with gamepad and keyboard

• implement save system

• finish burning village story events

• finish Tra’Tibowt boss fight
  -updated impact sprites (like jumping on an enemy’s head and stunning them)

• more general and universal sprites for the overworld encounters

That about covers things for this week. I’ll keep you all posted with another update next Sunday.

Have a great rest of your weekend!

-Matt