Hey everyone, thanks so much for playing Fowl Damage! It's been a long journey but the release went pretty smoothly (only one crash or two...) and I'm really glad I get to be on this side of it finally, making a little 1.0.1 patch for you all.
So anyways here's the changes in version 1.0.1 of Fowl Damage!
Fowl Damage v1.0.1
General
- Removed the gamepad rumble setting, as it turns out I never actually ended up really using gamepad rumble!
- Added the "Display Timer" setting to the options menu, which allows you to display a timer and death counter in the lower right corner of the screen (should be fun for streams and speedruns!)
- Removed the erroneous slope that was visible out of bounds in Tender Grove - Someplace Else. There used to be a secret there before I cracked down on my decision not to have any fake walls in the game.
- Renamed "House of Claws - Someplace Else" to "House of Claws - Between", since Tender Grove already has a level named that. Oops!
- Crashes and general weirdness related to the fade-out level transitions in Echoed Swells and Tender Grove should hopefully be fixed. They're still a little weird but I at least didn't manage any new crashes.
- Fixed a bug where you could use the warp menu to skip to the end of levels you hadn't even beaten yet.
- Exit Doorway hitboxes made just a biiiiiit wider. Should be a bit less easy to slip past a door you meant to enter.
Gameplay
Fowl Damage is a game where I generally want the player to feel free to explore and try things, which is why having a fast respawn, infinite lives, and very frequent checkpoints were so important to me. Unfortunately some of these frequent checkpoints have been punishing you for exploring ahead or wanting to go back and try something else! I've made a few tweaks with the hope to reduce this frustration point a little bit.
- Made sure every doorway in the game can be gone backwards through. most of the time this won't get you very far at all, but at least the doorways will all behave the same now! (Other forms of transport like entering a portal to a challenge level are still one-way only.)
- Made some small changes to level geometry throughout the game to try and punish the player less for just taking a peek at the next screen. I mostly focused this effort around tricky feathers and around exits to levels / challenge levels. If you end up at a doorway and decide to backtrack for that feather or other path you missed, that should be a bit more possible now!
- Made some small changes to level geometry in the final area of the game, aiming to create a couple more safety nooks around screen transitions, and to make the final screen of the level a bit more possible to sight-read / recover from mistakes on.
Audio
- Fixed some Music/Ambience tracks not being correctly labelled as such, resulting in them being controlled by the SFX slider or by only the Main Volume slider instead of the Music volume slider.
- Music during The Great Hum - Expel now properly loops instead of leaving you in judgmental silence.
- Fixed an issue where music wouldn't play during the game's finale if you loaded in to it from the main menu.
- When entering a new level, if it would play the same music/ambience track as the previous level, that music will now keep playing instead of restarting from 0.
- Added new (old) music to Tender Grove. (some piano improv to the motif of the main menu theme I recorded 5-6 years ago.) I'd intended the area to be a quiet break in the game, but it's four whole levels long and that was way too long to endure silence for!
- Some of the ambience from the first three levels of the Derelicts now also plays in Derelicts - Wastes
I hope these changes will make feather hunting a bit more smooth and speedruns or streams a bit more spicy with the built-in death counter! I'll be off to Tokyo Game Show soon to show the game, which should be interesting! First time demoing the game post-release.
Thanks again for playing my weird little egg game.
- May