V.46 Update

It's John Bond again! Here's the July update:

Over the last month, we've been focusing a lot on our Social Media and Store Page presence. We've recently done a huge overhaul of the Steam Page, including a fancy new trailer!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2412110/Rogue_Labyrinth/

We have done a micropatch for a few things, namely changing out something we called the TITLE system to be a more normal ACHIEVEMENTS system. It seems like a good idea to give smaller "objectives" to players who want some guidance on exploring the game, and then getting small rewards for it.

Beyond that, a lot of work has been done to make the Labyrinth and Iris' Room prettier, and adding in more good polish to make the game look and feel better. Little things like adding sparkles to interactable objects, or making Vending Machines move when something is bought can go a long way. The very act of making the audience actually blink now (as well as cheer) makes the game at least feel less creepy.

As I delve more into polish, I also delve more into polish programming, which is something I haven't had to do before. For example, there's some aspect of input lag and turbo controls that could potentially glitch the game. If certain commands are put in too quickly on controller, it can cause the game to be stuck in a frozen mode, or possibly get two upgrades at once, but if done on keyboard (how I usually test the game) it doesn't happen as keyboards don't allow too many inputs at the same time. I think I've fixed this by now, but there's a lot of these little surprises for bug fixing that really only comes up with slightly more polished games. More and more I am having "I have to program around THIS?" moments.

A new big hurdle is optimizing the game to tax computers less. I wouldn't expect this game to actually run a CPU that hard, but I want to be optimal when possible.

The next big game update (V.5) will be in 2-3 weeks, which will flesh out 50% of the Labyrinth runs! See you then!

CHANGELOG:

Small Patch: V.46

-Changed TITLE system into ACHIEVEMENTS (You get prizes for doing normal things in the game. Check the desk for details!)

-Added animations to the audience

-Updated a few sprites to be closer to their Busts

-Fixed a few objects to have the right outline colors (blue/green is friendly, red/yellow is enemy)

-Added sparkles and animations to important interactable objects

-Made Walls thicker to help with depth perception

-Made SFX work smarter, and added a couple more placeholder SFX to help know what you're doing

-Added a bit more Iris animations

-Lots of small bug fixes