About a month and a half and ago I released the first early demo build of a small game I have been working on in my spare time, call “Soul Tender”.
Progress has been slow, however as I have found myself lately with a bit more free time on my hands, I thought I would share some of the work I have beenputting into the game.

Firstly, a number of small bugs, and a couple of large game-breaking ones, have been fixed. The code handling gamepad support and the code updating the player physics have also been slightly improved, and while I haven’t properly profiled the effects of the code optimizations properly, the improvements are noticable, particularly on older systems.

Next, the first dungeon has been expanded, adding new puzzles, enemies, and changes (many of which aren’t permenent) to some of the background art and paritcles. In particular, there is a certain puzzle mechanic involving a sort of cabling system that I used in a previous Ludum Dare entry I made, and I am interested in reusing and expanding the idea here.

For now, the main remaining items to be implemented for this first section of the game is further visual improvements, and a boss fight to finish it out on.

Finally I have implemented a mock up main menu, options menu and credits screen, allowing you to change screen size, and mute game sounds and music. In game fonts have also been changed for a better ‘look and feel’ (credit to miss Jupiter Hadley for use of her Parvas font.) I have, however, had problems lately with scaling the screen size, and it is possible that the native size the game runs at (currently 854x480) may be reduced in the future.

That’s all for the moment. I do hope to have an updated version of demo released soon, but for now, I would encourage anyone who hasn’t tried the game, to give the currently released demo (bugs and all) a shot. Thanks for reading.

Troy