Jay Ingle - lead developer, designer, and artist:
Hello again. We last spoke a couple weeks ago, with Janne filling in on devlog duty. I have been working a lot on our demo, which was released in time for Steam Next Fest.
Since the release, I've been doing plenty of little fixes, little balances, and also watching a lot of people play the demo. But really, who has time for work when One Heart One Life mode exists?
One of the most encouraging things about this demo release: most people, once they finish the 30 minutes to 1 hour of play in the demo, play it again! I think that with the way the demo is designed, players get the feeling that they CAN beat this on a harder mode. That is good. A few people have finished the game on Hard ~ 1 Heart mode, which allows you to save and reload all you want, and you can even pick up heart containers (for percentage completion), but they will not increase your health points. Took me about 44 minutes, with a total of 45 deaths! Most of them only on one certain screen, which is pretty vicious on Hard mode.
However, the mode with the coolest name: One Heart One Life, has not been beaten. Yet. Will you be the first? Not if I beat it first. Join the official Pale Blue Studios discord and post a screenshot of your completed save file for all the brownie points in the world!
https://discord.gg/uA2Jpc4y
One more little note: the One Life modifier does not delete your save, it just puts you back at the very start if you die. And it does keep track of your deaths, so if you complete the demo with the One Life modifier, your save slot will show how many times you died in your attempts!
Janne - the other guy
I could just add by summarizing some of the important fixes and updates we've done in the last week:
- Added a few new gameplay modes from player suggestions, the above mentioned "One Heart" and "One Life" -options.
- Added a message showing automap controls
- Removed the weapon from the character sprite until you pick one up
- Added various effects when damaging the shield
- Lots of new sfx added as well as a few animations that weren't quite yet complete earlier.
- Some HUD elements are more visible now.
- Fixed code warnings, and a small memory leak
- Saves now track a few more things, and we show more relevant information in the load screen, e.g. we track completion % and deaths.
- Fixed some practical usability issues such as being able to open the pause menu while dying
- Some balancing of difficulty here and there
- Tried to change the desktop icon, probably unsuccessfully? 😄
- Automap styles updated multiple times, now they're pretty great.
Overall the number of changes is fairly large for 1 week, but most of them were pretty small, and the game feels significantly better due to them.