Update 0.20

Hello everyone!

Another update focused on tying up loose ends and generally just trying to get everything neat and tidy for the Web-Release. The plan is to launch to Kongregate and Newgrounds on Friday the 24th. I'll need to contact Armor Games to see about getting the game posted on that site as well. There will likely be a few more mini updates over the course of the next week as I try to get as much of the game polished up as possible.

I'll be making a pair of posts in the Discord Suggestions board to get some last minute suggestions for: 'missing stuff' and 'minor balancing' so any feedback there is greatly appreciated. Otherwise I've still got a pretty big list of bugs-and-crashes to deal with though most of the major game breaking ones are now fixed. The only really major thing still on my list is to add a bunch of new Yendor levels since we're really lacking in this area and I don't want the Web-Game to suffer from a really repetitive end game. Along the same lines I'd like to get another generator (or two) completed for The-Upper-Dungeon since this zone gets the most play time and so is the most in danger of becoming repetative.

With all that being said, I'm actually feeling pretty good about the Friday release. Obviously there's an absolute mountain of work to do (3 years of EA in fact!) but if the goal of the Web-Release was to create a prototype and proof of concept of some of the new ideas I've been working on then I think its succeeded quite well in this regard. What we've got here is a reasonably stable, reasonably balanced foundation that I hope will be really easy to build on in the years to come. 

I'm pretty burnt out at this point and mostly just looking forward to finishing this phase of the project but I'm also really excited about starting EA and getting to the actual meat of the development. For the bulk of the past 9-10 months of development the entire focus has been on trying out new systems, new maps, and generally trying to achieve a state of balance that I think in retrospect RFIII was lacking even in its final version. I've spent very little of this time actually adding new content or mechanics which tends to be the really fun and inspiring part. The plan though is that with the foundation layed by the Web-Release I should be able to focus pretty exclusively on adding 'new stuff' for at least the first year of EA without having to worry about the whole house of cards collapsing. So I'm quite excited about this!

So anyways, enough of that, here's the update:

ABILITY ICONS:
This was where most of the work this week was spent. I think we've now got a unique icon for every ability in the game and I cleaned up some of the older ones as well. I'm not totally happy with all of this (when am I ever lol), but its going to have to be 'good enough' for the Web-Release. There are definitely going to be some major 'art blocks' during early access i.e. several month long updates focused completely on iterating on the games artwork since this tends to take me a long time.

• Lunge
• Shadow-Step
• Storm-Arrow
• Sprint
• Dash Attack
• Bear-Trap (also updated the ground version)
• Jump
• Power-Strike
• Berserk
• Blood-Lust
• Fire-Storm
• Ice-Lance

ANIMATION:
Got a simple animation working for Ice-Lance. This took less time then I thought it would and doesn't look half bad. I'd like to eventually get unique little animations (and sounds) for all the major abilities in the game. Not only does it look better but I think it helps the 'readability' of the game to have each ability distinguishable by 1) animation, 2) sound and 3) the text we currently have.

MENU AND UI:
I honestly hate doing UI stuff and this time was no exception :P Really just cleaning out the races from all the menus which is doubly frustrating since I'll be adding them right back in for EA.

• Removed races from new game menu.
• Removed races from the game records menu.
• Removed races from the stats table which actually lets us display all the stats per class which is neat at least.
• Removed the Toggle-Full-Screen button from the options menu since this doesn't work in a browser.
• The scrolling map background will never repeat the same zone twice in a row.
• The scrolling map background will never show Yendor:4 which looks kind of weird when you can see the multiple Yendor rooms.
• Fixed some missing or badly aligned text on several abilities and items.

BUGS AND CRASHES:

• Added a final safety check for NaN HP that should solve all of the Yendor HP problems (and any similar problems lurking in the code base).

BALANCE:

• Reverted the changes to Berserk where normal speed enemies become fast. Really I just wanted this change to effect Berserker type enemies so that they'd have a fast and deadly state vs a normal state. I was not thinking about Inspire which shows up right from the beginning of the game. I'll need to think of something else for Berserkers.

UPDATE 0.20.1:

• Fixed bug with Ice dealing damage to enemies.
• Removed races from daily challenge.