Border struggles, more artifacts & different characters (Patreon)

A tale of borders

This has been a bit of a hectic "feature". One of the pieces of feedback we got from the playtest was that it was unclear which parts of the level were reachable by the player, and which weren't, because we used the same grass sprite everywhere.

A suggestion we received from our playtesters was to simply get rid of the grass surrounding the gardens, and make them a void instead. 

We weren't a fan of this look however, as this really gave too much of an "indoor" feeling, and not the outdoor garden vibes we wanted. Since you're playing at night however, we've found a good middle ground, and are changing the grass outside of the playable level to a darker color. The transitions are still going to be updated, we just need to create some custom sprites for that, but we definitely like this version of showing the inside vs. outside the most.  

Switching Characters

Last week we added the option to switch between weapons, but in our final game we also want to be able to switch between 4 characters. We didn't have any code-wise support for this in-game yet however, so William rewrote our character controller so you can now swap between 4 different characters (our warrior and placeholder Koala's).

More artifacts

We were still a bit too light on artifacts for our liking, so we added another two!

First off, the thunder axe, this axe pierces through enemies in a straigh line, after which it explodes after a set distance, dealing AoE damage. 

And then the paper lantern, which flies over the terrain and searches the nearest enemy before exploding into a ball of fire. 

Both of these item's sprites are still placeholder, as we were focusing mainly on the exact mechanics. 

Progress Grab Bag

Some extra, smaller improvements we added over the past week:

- Implemented the ability to stagger enemies

- Added shadows to decorations and other visual updates

- Fixed a bunch of dumb bugs

What's Next?

As we're gearing up for our garden stage, we've ordered even more tiles, to clean the final pieces of placeholder tiles, such as our blessing shrines, and adding even more variety to our rooms with trees and rock formations. 

Next week we'll be overhauling all the rooms and layouts, so that everything will feel a bit more open, and the rooms make more sense as an actual garden, and not just rooms like you would have inside a building. I think end of next week is also our current goal for submitting our full demo build to Steam as well, so we have another 2-ish weeks to get feedback and keep improving in preparation for Next Fest. 

Now that all our main mechanics are in, it's a lot of cleanup of the bugs we've been ignoring, and improving some other things such as our UX and more tilesets.