This update completely overhauls the tutorial and dialogue system, but only for the first five holes (I wanted to test the new system publicly before doing the work on the remaining levels).
Previously, all of the tutorials and character dialogue were rolled into the goals system, which resulted in huge walls of text and the quest log filling up the entire right half of the screen, which made it hard to, you know, actually play the game.
The new tutorial system splits the story and tutorials up into four separate systems:
Dismissable dialogue and flavour text.
Full-screen paged tutorials with videos, which can be closed and re-opened as needed. Past tutorials can be accessed at any time from the in-game menu.
Simple control prompts which appear on screen as needed.
The old goal system, which no longer has any text, but now makes it much clearer what you need to do to complete the goals, with sub-goal checkboxes and progress bars.
All of the tutorials in these five holes have been rewritten from scratch to be more concise and direct, while the dialogue now has a bit more flavour and personality. If you get a chance to play this, I would love to hear your thoughts on how well the new tutorial system teaches the basic mechanics and controls.
Other changes:
Goals that require you go get the ball above/below a certain altitude now indicate this using a dashed line, rather than specifying a numeric value. This is in preparation to remove most of the numeric displays from the UI, as they are cluttering the screen and not adding much value. (I want you to develop an intuition for how orbits work, not be thinking about maths.)
Brand new main menu with an animated background and new music track.
Levels now load in the background, allowing the fade-out animation to play immediately. (As opposed to clicking Start Game and having the UI freeze for several seconds while the level loads.)
Changed the font used for headings to match the game logo.
Level 4: Increased max shot power so if you land on Earth you can get back to orbit.
Engine: Upgraded to Godot 4.6.1.
Bugfixes:
Fixed black rectangle around the flag/hole in atmosphere.
Fixed music bug where if rapidly switching scenes, you could get stuck with two songs playing at the same time.
Adding/removing a controller now switches the input mode (displaying the correct glyphs). Note that some tutorials still only display keyboard glyphs.
Fixed shot arrow being partially transparent before first hit on each level.
Thanks to everyone who played the previous version and gave feedback!