PixelPuddle
patreon
Purple water, auto-animations, controllers, minimap, and tutorial
🕑 Added 2023-06-21 09:34:25 +0000 UTCHey all,
I figured I'd give it a week and a bit before the next update because of the cluster of bugfix updates, but I'm back with what I've been up to since then - the work towards part 2 of the demo! The preview is of the new and improved purple water shader - it now has visual flow and wavy-reflections, something I intended to add a while back and finally got around to doing because I also had to fix a bug where the purple water wasn't appearing at all on specific hardware.
Some of the most recurring feedback I got from the initial demo was that a) it was too hard, and b) players wanted some breathing room to explore without necessarily entering an animation. In order to achieve those I've made it so Erisia (the player character) doesn't auto-start animations until her pink gauge is filled enough. This means you have to press the Use button to accept the magic entities' invitation and engage in an animation. If you do so, your pink gauge increases until Erisia begins auto-starting animations again. I've also adjusted the difficulty of the entity animations so that it's not as easy to lose hearts, and made rhythms easier to hit at certain spots in certain animations (e.g. the bee-ladies). I hope to flesh out rhythms a bit more, but we'll see in what way as I experiment a bit more here :)
Speaking of pressing buttons, I've fleshed out the input settings page a bit, now you have three tabs: keyboard, mouse, and controller - which of course means better controller support! Each of these tabs can add their own bindings, up to two per as before. The controller support was mainly just adding icons and making sure the Nin'do Joy-Cons I have work well with the game - I don't have other types of controllers on hand (yet) so I can't directly ensure they work perfectly, but I expect them to mostly work. There's still some in-game clean-up and interface clean-up to be done, but it's mostly there.
Next up is the world map - this is something I've heard people want, too, because it's easy to get lost and/or hard to know where to go next. The minimap should alleviate both of those a little and allow you players to get around without going the wrong way by mistake. Just note it's still work-in-progress, but I suspect it won't look too different from what it's like now.
I've started work on a tutorial animation - this is a unique NPC animation involving the Guidess in the spawn village. She will offer the option to learn via one of her button choices, and it'll be an animation with dialogue explaining the various aspects of an animation - rhythm, edge, the pink and white gauges, and so on. This is again in response to feedback - some players found the rhythm stuff confusing, and hopefully a guided tour of how it works should take care of that.
Lastly, I've done work on the cat-tailed lady and her quest - the setup to get the potion, as well as the reward animation are both being worked on actively right now. The quest part of finding and obtaining the potion will be fleshed out a bit with some more steps, too, which I hope will be fun :)
That's it for this one - I'll be back around early July with another progress update!
Comments
Pixel Puddle
Thanks for letting me know, should be fixed on Linktree now :)
viperfan7
Looks like the discord link is broken
