Hi, it's been a while! I'll go more into why in the "Status Update" portion, but first I wanted to cover what exactly this update is and why it was so important.
Visuals
The visuals of the game were always a work in progress and bound to change. I didn't plan on that change being this big. There are still a lot of similarities in style and that approach, but the UI and rendering have both been overhauled not once but multiple times before landing on what it is now. I made the decision to switch the game to forward rendering after a lot of thinking it over. It was a switch that I personally believe made our game better. We just weren't utilizing deferred rendering to its potential for this game and the frames saved in the switch helped a lot. We had also originally made every asset in the game ourselves, and when you are a really small team working for free, it gets hard and tedious to say the least. That said we were able to integrate some lovely asset packs that really brought the game to a new level and were a complete gamechanger. I can say I'm finally happy with the look of the game and hope you guys are too.
tldr:
UI was completely changed
Game switched to forward rendering (performance gain was too much to ignore)
Slight stylistic choices made to change visuals
Integration of some high-quality assets to compliment the overall aesthetic of the game.
Gameplay
To be brief... the game was basically stripped down and remade. Thats as plain as it gets.
I can't stress that enough the game was entirely remade. The base code everything was done on was just bad and that's entirely my own fault. I was nearly new when this game started development and now have literal years of experience. The game was just impossible to expand upon and waiting to fall apart like a ticking time bomb... and it did just that. It fell apart and I took the LONG LONG LONG journey of remaking everything. Along with the visual elements of course.
tldr:
See line one under "Gameplay" ^
Entire Thing
The Whole Game
I'm tired grandpa
Status Update
Okay now to the boring part. So, what is going on with the game now?? I'm actually almost done with level 3. Like I expect it to ship around Halloween (not actually intentional just happened that way).
Why did this take so long?
In short... I've been busy man. With life. When I started this, I was in college, had a part time job, and was single. So basically, I had a lot of free time on my hands. Since then, I graduated, got a full-time job, started paying rent, and have a girlfriend lol. Working for free in my spare time felt less and less appealing as time went on and this whole thing just kind of faded into the background.
Then suddenly things got a lot more normal once again and I had the time I needed. So here we are.
I hate making excuses and sounding like that, but that's just how it is. The rest of my team has been hard at work on other projects though, and there will be some updates on that to come!
What I'm saying is, if you guys are cool with it, I thank you for being patient with me and this game. It will get finished. Hope you enjoy this update and please let us know if there is anything wrong in our discord or on the google sheet that is now in game!!