MOVEMENT MAGICK

hey every one of YOU
it's been a while since the last update, so thanks for your patience
and thanks to all that kept playing and exploring in the mean-time.
today marks the release of the new movement magick system.

this is the biggest update EVER! so far.
a lot of that work has been spent on new systems and mechanics.

after the initial early access release, once the dust had settled, I wanted to make some improvements based on player feedback and my own playtesting.
here are the goals I set back in April:

goal: tie more of player moveset into combat
goal: deepen the combat system with new mechanics
goal: new enemy encounters better designed around player moveset
goal: make (some) enemies feel less tanky
goal: add more content to existing levels
goal: more quests

so that's what I've spent the past few months doing. the result is the new Movement Magick system, as well as a bunch of other combat improvements, a complete rework of Idiot's Domain, and loads more miscellanea (you can see the full changelog below).

this update took an unusually long time due to all of the new systems. so, the amount of actual new content may feel disproportionate to the time taken. in total, I've probably spent about a month on the Idiot's Domain rework, which is the kind of cadence I'm hoping to maintain for new updates moving forward.

------------------------------------------------------
Changelog
------------------------------------------------------

MOVEMENT MAGIC
- added movement magic system
- added status effects system
- added 63 movespells, including:
- blessings and curses (via new status effect system)
- damage type attunements
- projectiles
- projectile path modifiers
- entity spawn / summons
- "utility" stuff
- a bunch of other various movespells of different sorts & styles

FAIRY TEMPLE / OFFERINGS
- opened up the Fairy Temple location in the overworld
- added fairy offerings system to the temple (exchange fairies for spells)

COMBAT
- added a basic parry mechanic. certain projectiles and melee attacks can now be parried, at the expense of stamina and briefly increased vulnerability either side of parry window.
- added new damage types and resistances
- added new status effects system
- added damage type buildup pop effects (uses new status effects system)
- fixed some animation glitches when using melee attack in certain directions while strafing
- improvements to guard and parry (enemy side).
- guard is supposed to represent enemy "blocking", and prevents poise as well as health damage.
- poise is what keeps the enemy grounded. break poise to knock the enemy into the air and perform powerful beatdown finishers.
- lock-on system has had a pass and I think it's more useful now.
- knockback system (the relationship between player power, entity size, and knockback type/amount) has been reworked and is (in my opinion) more fun
- melee combat has been reworked with new lock-on and knockback in mind; my goal was for melee to feel less tanky and more complementary to movement
- simple melee combat combo system
- simple combat multipliers for velocity and airtime (rewards long-shot dashes and high altitude dive attacks
- removed restriction on vertical dashes - you can now aim dash attacks up or down (I think this feels way better and makes more sense)

ENEMY BEHAVIOUR
- enemy projectiles can now break containers
- added ledge detection for roaming entities so they're less likely to throw themselves into the void

UI
- redesigned pretty much all in-game UI to work more consistently across all screen resolutions - notably, 4:3 no longer breaks the UI (though text readability at extremely low resolutions cannot be guaranteed)
- streamlined music player in pause menu + fixed some unreadable text
- locations viewer in pause menu now groups locations by parent zone
- added control remapping to settings window of pause menu
- added secrets collection window to pause menu
- added NPC dialogue collection window to pause menu
- added entities/bestiary collection window to pause menu
- added movement magick spell editor window to pause menu
- reworked main menu UI and fixed scaling issues at some resolutions

PERFORMANCE
- improved Orb Hollow and Upper Frogton loading times by about 5-10 seconds on average.
- improved performance of collecting large amounts of metal stars at once
- improved New Game loading time and reduced perception of lag.
- fixed a big lag spike/stutter whenever the intro cutscene was skipped.
- added a hold-based skip + prompt to intro cutscene to prevent accidental skips.
- improved Load Game loading times; huge thanks to @jamie_brie for the work done on the [EggCellerator](https://github.com/zieraell/EggCellerator) mod that helped identify optimizations and formed the basis to code improvements responsible for this!

QUALITY OF LIFE
- improved controller responsiveness in main menu
- fixed some wall run enter animation glitches
- made strafe toggle on/off by default. this makes wall running require one less input, which frees up mental load, and so should feel smoother.
- improved lock-on system (and changed default input to right-click-hold)
- added satisfying bounceback on dashes into walls/surfaces
- improved vertical killzone checks so that areas like Bogplex Castle should no longer result in endless falling.
- added "homeward bone" style item with unlimited uses to all player inventories to help escape situations where player gets stuck
- new game now auto-equips sceptre and hat, because that's less annoying
- added a small delay to time trial start after talking to Clock Demon
- repositioned time trial timer to a less obstructive position
- you can re-align camera by long-pressing lock-on button
- some tweaks to make wall running and jumping feel better
- quit to main menu
- option to switch between toggle or hold to strafe
- an on-screen indicator that appears when you're strafing (helps with wall running)

AREA TWEAKS/REWORKS/UPDATES (additions and improvements to existing levels, focusing on platforming and combat)
- Idiot's Domain (complete level rework including new boss (RIP Idiot Giant), new NPCs, quests, contraptions, a bunch of random new things)

NEW AREAS
- Fairy Temple (place to exchange fairies for movespells & see your fairy collection grow)

ETERNAL THANKS.