Sprite Overhauls, UI updates, Stat Tweaking (Patreon)

Blessings & Animated Lighting

We had another round of sprite orders completed, this included some more of what we already had (trees & rock formations), but also some new and cool sprites. Instead of pillars with runes on them, we now have 3 dedicated statues for the blessing gods. We also got some metal braziers as additional light/decoration sources, and along with those we got animated versions of our lanterns as well, so they aren't staticly lit object anymore. 

These animations did a lot if you ask me in terms of getting a more alive world, and not making our world seem as flat and static anymore. Especially when utilized in our new rooms, I expect these to shine.

We also fought really strongly to resist the urge to be able to light/unlight the different lightsources, as we thought it would be cool, but also a very clear case of scope creep, with little additional value (for now...?).

Character swap UI

Last week you could already swap characters, now we actually added a UI element that shows the available characters. This will be visible in the homebase, at the top of your screen. This way we hope to make it obvious to the player when they have a new character unlocked, and they can easily change between them. 

Stat tweaking

We still had a whole bunch of placeholder / debug values for attacks, items, enemies,... which were starting to pop-up as issues when playtesting the game. We got rid of all of these, so now you (unfortunately) can't launch an enemy into another room anymore. Most of our items now also make a lot more sense in general.

Progress Grab Bag

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

- We've gotten rid of the AI placeholder art in our game, notably our Main Menu background, as well as Master Sun's dialogue image. Whilst Steam allows it, we personally don't want it in our game once we release. 

- We (temporarily) got rid of the inside/outside grass distinction, as the discoloration really felt out of place. We are planning on getting new wall sprites in the coming weeks, after which we will revisit the issue of not having a clear inside/outside distinction. 

What's Next?

We're planning on submitting our demo to Steam this week, and we have one big remaining task, reworking our rooms. This is currently still a work in progress, as we had to create some additional tools for to work smarter, not harder. This will probably take another day or so to complete, and then we have all our main requirements done. I'll be using this time as well to give our text another pass, as some text elements fall outside of their parent UI elements, and there are some naming inconsistencies as well that we should resolve.