New rooms, getting ready for Next Fest (Patreon)

Reworked rooms

This has been a beast of a issue that we've been dealing with for more than a week at this point. We've completely remade our grid system for room generation, the kinds of rooms (hallways vs. rooms), and actually made them look good now as well utilizing the different tilemaps we have ordered over the past months. 

There were some pretty big bugs that came up as well, such as room generation suddenly requiring 10 minutes of compute time to find a valid room configuration, or our tilemaps all shifting .5 tile. These are mainly solved now however, and the only thing left is adding a bit more variation in terms of rooms sizes, layouts and enemy spawns. 

Steam Demo

Last Monday, we finally submitted our first builds to Steam for them to validate. Our demo store page has already been approved, but we are still waiting on them to approve our actual demo build. After  this approval, we can still keep pushing updates without them having to go through Steam's review queue. 

Tensions have definitely been rising over the past few weeks as we are getting closer to Next Fest. This will most likely be one of the most defining points of our game's marketing, so we want things to be perfect once it rolls around. 

We still have a few things to finish, such as the above-mentioned rooms, as well as some extra tooling on our end to enable/disable certain parts of the game easily between the demo and the full game. 

Progress Grab Bag

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

- We have fixed a lot of inconsistent localizations, and also translated all of the current game to Mandarin and Japanese. We removed support for Dutch. 

- Fixed missing popups to interact with blessing shrines

- Added more content, such as milestones, items and library entries

What's Next?

We've sent out even more art orders, some will still be completed before the Next Fest and our demo's launch, such as reworked interactables for switching weapons, heirlooms and the library. Others will be taking a while longer, such as our cultivator spritesheets. 

Apart from that there are a few small know bugs which we can breeze through in a day, and then we can focus on adding some more item variety and content still. 

One other big thing that we will get to working on ASAP once our new rooms is done, is overhauling our store page, as it is seriously outdated at the moment. Here we're looking at creating a 30s mini trailer, updating our screenshots, giving our tags a once-over since they aren't a good match anymore, and adding GIFs to our page description as well. Almost all of these todo's are dependent on our new rooms, since they will be such a big visual change.