Happy Halloween, everyone! I have two event to cover in this devlog.
First of all, me and Rio finally got around to release the OST in Steam. More on that:View game pageI would like to add that it was unfair of me to rush him with the OST before game release, because this haste was justified for my faith towards numerology and the desire to release the game as quickly as possible, as if someone else besides me was actually waiting for it. Generally, hurry myself for weird reasons is very typical of me, and it in most cases backfires, but hurry someone else is just disrespectful.
Secondly, I have desided to pay homage towards Cave Story by Studio Pixel, and make a Halloween theme for my game, like the one for Cave Story+.
Someone may call it a junk (me, for example), since the world map is barely changed: just the color of the grass, ground and sky, and some locations weren't changed at all. Well, it is, but there's more. I had to rethink the way for drawing humanoids to redraw enemy and hero sprites, which I mentioned before. And I have succeeded:
And now to the bad part.
The Halloween theme isn't a texture replacement, but an alternative resource pack that, in addition to redrawn sprites, includes unmodified sprites, maps, and shaders. This means that a lot of duplicate information sits deadweight in the game files. Furthermore, if I want to update the map, I'll have to update both packs. Ideally, this theme should be a mod like any player could make. The sprite loading rework I was planning could have partially solved this problem, but I decided to take the easy way out because I didn't know how long it would take: I might not have finished before a deadline. I'd already reworked the language file system, which was quite a headache, and I didn't know what awaited me with working on an even more complex system. And next, I also wanted to add the campaign system and user maps support.
I decided it would be easier for me to start working on a new engine, because otherwise the game would turn into The Ship of Theseus, and in a not particularly good one. I thought about that since the release, when I was working with various external libraries for the game and SDK. Although the current engine is full of actually smart solutions that will be ported to the new one and won't take much of my time, and the new zone editor, which is already compatible with the old map format, is almost ready, I'm unlikely to create a new devlog the next month. Perhaps the next devlog entry will cover the progress of two or three months.