It's been a long while! Summer months tend to be a little slower for me since I have other stuff going on, but I've still been chugging along when I can. A lot of the work I've been doing has simply been easy/hard charting for bonus levels that are still missing those two difficulties -- Violet Hyperwave, Flower Fang, Super Mega Zero, Let's Have an Adventure, Fur Elise, Rondo Alla Turca, Standing Here Alone, and Song of the Sea have all gotten easy and hard mode charts in the past months. None of that is really devlog-worthy, but I have some other neat stuff to report on now too.
Level Fading
There's a new "Level Fading" advanced setting that will add an extra challenge by either hiding obstacles until you're about to reach them...
...or by making them fade out in advance, forcing you to look ahead and remember them.
Both versions also have a more intense variant that is more extreme with its timing. And for those who =really= want to challenge themselves, "Invisible" mode will do exactly that -- make everything completely invisible, forcing you to memorize the entire chart!
Rather than implement this through making every obstacle and terrain segment in the game fade out dynamically (ugh!), I instead implemented this by drawing an extra copy of the backdrops above everything except for the player sprite. This is kind of quick-and-dirty trick that just happens to work since almost everything I need to fade out is on a lower layer than the things I still want to show. There were a few special cases I needed to handle explicitly (water zones, and grass), but they weren't too bad to handle once the basic effect was working.
Steam Achievement Rework
Steam achievements are a system that I haven't touched for years, so the old achievement definitions are hopelessly out of date. I took some time to give that an entire overhaul, defining new achievements for each of the different difficulty levels, as well as a few extra ones like your 1,000th respawn, or collecting 2,500 coins in total.
As part of this I put together over 100 different achievement icon exports, to cover achievements for easy, normal, and hard difficulties, as well as grayscale versions of them (for when you haven't unlocked them yet). Some of these were a bit of fun to put together, like the ones for unlocking all of the characters and followers in the game where I crammed together all of the sprites into a single icon.
Internally I've also updated the way these are tracked, so that instead of just the achievements themselves, you can also see a numeric progress value of how far you are toward reaching each one:
Other Improvements
As usual, some other minor stuff has been taken care of as well. For example, the level browser menu now has the "Return to Menu" button persist at the top of the screen even when you scroll down, allowing for easier navigation out of the menu when using mouse or touchscreen controls.
Another notable change: after a good long while of playing around with various charts, I've changed the default coloration of the wings for air jumps and flight paths. Air jumps and flight paths both use blue wings, unless there is a green flying enemy on that same beat. You can still revert back to the older coloration (blue for air jumps, green for flight paths), but I tried the two variants side by side and felt that the dots on the flight path itself were enough to distinguish it from the air jumps, and felt that the green coloration being used this way helped me parse some patterns more easily.
Besides miscellaneous other bugfixes, I also verified and fixed "Apple ProMotion" support on iOS devices (120hz refresh rate), so the game will by default look much more smooth on those devices when that's available. I also took some time to optimize asset structuring in builds, which means patch updates should be more efficient (the latest one is only 30MB).
That's going to do it for this update! Not a ton of exciting work, but progress is progress -- only about 5 more bonus songs need recharting at this point, which will be a nice little milestone to check off sometime soon, hopefully.