Dev Diary #9: Less than a week to go!!

Hey Everyone!

Less than a week to go! I still can't believe we're almost there. These last couple weeks I've been hard at work polishing up as much as I can before release, and Jared has been updating those last minute art assets. A lot has changed since I posted last, so I'll put a list below of the big stuff. If you want to join us for the release hype, check in on our discord below!

Big numbers!

One of the bigger updates has been balancing the minigame progress, especially after completing a few game modes. The Fishing and Mining games were lagging a bit in super-duper late game. Our beloved underwater friend, Henry, needed a little more oomph, so I gave him a bonus upgrade to help him keep up! (see below)

Some Updates

Since we’re almost at the finish line, there have been quite a few updates and fixes since last time, and there are still tweaks and polish being completed for launch. Here’s a list:

• THE ENDING! The true ending is now playable for those of you who have completed at least 2 game modes (full-release content).
• New art! Check out the new character sprites! We're still missing a bunch of the side profile/attack animations, so some characters might look a little weird when battling. Those should be coming very soon!
• New music! (post-demo content) Check out Frog town and Battle town! We're still tweaking these a bit.
• Completed map! Well, maybe not totally completed, but very close! (also post-demo content)
• Tweaked late-game scaling for all minigames! I put caps on certain upgrades that don't really help with endgame once you buy a bunch of them, and I made a few upgrades scale more easily. This should help some of the balancing for of max high scores for some minigames (especially Fishing and Rock Digging), and will also help with some frame rate issues.
• With the better minigame scaling (and because of some other feedback), I decided to increase cauldron requirement scaling accordingly. Tougher Enemies and EVIL have changed the most, so hopefully those will still be beatable (I didn't change EVIL as much as Tougher Enemies, though).
• Ice fishing has been reworked! Now, there are "bonus fish" in each of the levels that essentially work as powerups. The amount of these fish increases with each loss, along with added hook weight.
• Added battle maps for Battletown and the fighting pits
• Added some new character portraits for the town leaders
• Fish now telegraph their next move. They'll turn in the direction they're going to move for about half a second before shooting forward.
• Changed Nyx's sprite! This one was kind of half changed in the last update, since we were testing out a few ideas. Now it should be consistent!
• Added a new meta-upgrade for Fishing to make Henry a little more impactful as the game goes on
• Fixed Cart game blorb's not bouncing correctly when they get too big
• Fixed some lag caused by the Ice game's bonus block upgrade
• Fixed an issue with REALLY large numbers in the ice game not calculating correctly
• Fixed the fighting pit NPC so you can actually see it! The menu should work now as well!
• Fixed some other menus
• Changed some of the hidden villager objects
• Fixed a bug with the new ice fishing bonus fish
• Fixed some of the cart game attacks not changing color when they're upgraded to have a different element
• Fixed the prior battle position not working for some characters
• Added some more character portraits
• Fixed random bugs and visual stuff
• Fixed a bug with the Chinese translation crashing the game
• Added new music to Magetown
• Fixed Fump's location for the swamp puzzles
• Added an arrow to indicate where Henry is going to be in the fishing game as you get close
• A bunch of other small things!
• Fixed the ghosts having 950% dodge rate...
• Fixed the ending not showing up when starting it with the effects level all the way down
• Fixed the alert not showing up above the Magetown leader's head when finishing her quest
• Fixed apple game's idle AI to not ignore golden+apples
• SSP blast meta upgrade now works on set bombs

And as always keep posting your feedback. and I'll see you on release day!

Thank you for reading!
Pete

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2619650/Cauldron/