UI Improvements have begun as well as a bunch of other visual polish. Expect an updated trailer soon, alongside the OST being posted on YouTube.
Content/Balancing
The Tutorial's info tabs have been reworked to instead be a list of tabs you can navigate through in the pause menu. They become available for access sequentially as you progress the Tutorial and your access to them does not get reset if you leave (though doing that of course resets the tutorial). The pause windows were a step in the right direction all that time ago, but it's time to take the next step alongside the general UI polish.
LEVEL SELECT UI COMPLETE REWORK. This should be much more visually pleasing and also much easier for controller users to navigate. The existing level select UI was bugging the shit out of me because it looked bad, ran on terrible code, and was forced to be a nightmare for controllers to navigate. The new UI is missing some extra visual oomph through animations right now, but besides that, it's great.
Level descriptions have been added for Forest, Plaza, and Cave.
All mine entities are now killable by standard damage, but they now detonate much faster to compensate. Mines were weird because you could bounce off of them and punch them, but they were invincible and there was no way for the player to figure that out intuitively. Originally this was out of fear that reckless swinging would comfortably take them out, but existing enemy encounters show that making them detonate faster will punish that just fine.
Javelineer's javelins have been made much faster, but it throws them at a slower rate and it has a warning now.
Visual/Audio
The text size of various windows has been reduced. The text sizes were made with mobile in mind, but that won't be happening until full release so I might as well change it now.
The text color of various text boxes has been changed. Didn't do the bestiary yet because I haven't gotten around to updating the Bestiary's UI yet.
Fixed the "unfinished bosses" loading screen tip still being there.
Changed the tileset of Free Play to be the same as Tutorial.
NEW OUTLINE SHADER APPLIED. This outline is overall more clean as it does not eat into pixels, and it also applies even when enemies are being affected by light. I may have missed a few issues so please let me know if any are spotted (outline not changing color, outline being way too big, etc.),
COMBO TEXT UPDATED. This is a quick version I threw together, but I've been meaning to fix the bugged score text for a while now. Though the score popup above anobrites is bugged on literally just Forest... Going to try and fix that soon.
New logic has been applied so that all enemies that are supposed to be affected by light are affected by light (only applies in areas with actual light and darkness).
The blue tint of Guarding enemies has been replaced with a white glowy aura. The new outline is bugged in a few areas so this is more of a band-aid.,
Added a new loading screen tip pertaining to how the Skip to Boss button is unlocked.
Added a new loading screen tip talking about boss design. Now that they're all in a good spot, I can confidently stand on business with them.
Bugfixes
Fixed the Guard playing its Guard-Break sound effect twice.
Fixed the options menu in the main menu not opening on the first click.
Fixed the menu navigation for controller affecting mouse navigation. The navigation needed to select a default button for the controller to smoothly navigate through each menu, but this also force-selected a default until you moved your mouse, which caused some clunkiness.
Fixed Mass Mutation having a MUCH lower chance than intended to actually mutate enemies. Note that it still has the 6-enemy limit.
Fixed Plasm Mines being able to merge with Greenies to make Pouncers.
Fixed being unable to bounce off of Plasms. Again, please report any enemy or stunning attack that you cannot bounce off of. Stuff like this is easy to miss with how disastrous the codebase is (as well as me basically being the only one working on it), and one enemy randomly not being bounceable makes the gameplay much less satisfying.
Fixed instantly ending the combo when a Slash is cancelled by a Dash and fixed combos being cut short when they weren't supposed to.