Instantaneously, a frigid freeze flashes in the air, and before you know it, you've been encased in a cube of ice: unable to move for all of eternity. Get Icced, Dummy.
..At least, that's what would happen if the game had to follow medieval magic logic. Fortunately, we can achieve the same effect minus the ice with code!
Pausing!
This week has seen the beginnings of the new pausing feature, so let's go over its plans and then cover current progress.
Mechanically, pausing a file is going to replace leaving the file. This means that whatever key you had binded to "ExitFile" is now going to pause the game instead. From the pause screen, you can simply go back to the level select (or restart) from there. After some feedback from a friend, Esc is also hard-coded to pause the game during play as well, just as a failsafe.
The pause screen is going to be the exact same layout as the options menu in the homescreen, with all the same settings. A lot of why pausing isn't done yet is due to the fact that all of these settings need to work as soon as you resume the game or exit it. You'll even be able to change your character!
Anyway, while you can technically pause the game at the moment, the rest of the game wasn't built for it, so it kind of combusts when you do it. I'm going to have to work through a lot of bugs and weird scenarios (and probably insider testing) before this can get checked for shipping, lol.
There are a couple.. uhh.. "quirks" here that'll have to be ironed out.
Some more things are planned for pausing, such as a countdown when you unpause before the game starts again, and other quality-of-life things. However, I think it's a better idea to show these mechanics rather than continue typing about them.
Up Next
I've been getting more efficient with my work outside of this project, however, a game jam at my school is coming up this coming weekend. I can guarantee a devlog, but I can't guarantee the pausing feature being completely done. I'll try, though! :P
After pausing, all of the major features for 1.3 will be ready - except achievements. At the moment, we're still waiting on the engine's support for Steam achievements to be realized. If we complete 1.3 before that happens, we'll probably just start on 2.0 work in the background until achievements are ready. There'll be stuff we can post about, and other stuff that's better to be revealed later :).
Thanks as always for reading these devlogs! They're honestly the main reason I still make progress on this game, even when the pressure from everything else is as immense as ever. But fortunately, that pressure is only going to be so high for two more weeks.
-Encabulated Games