There was a lot of back-end work that went into this patch, which isn't super visible. The biggest change was building the machinery to create, store, test and edit islands easily. I now have a solid foundation for heavy iteration on the world content and I expect to fully recuperate the time spent building that foundation.
New Features
New tileset(s) which allow for more visual variety. Highlights include:
Caves!
Visually thin ledges that the player can jump or drop through.
Adventure islands have been rebuilt using the new tileset.
The Tutorial has been rebuilt using the new tileset.
The player now enters each world from a portal.
The player cannot dash or blink when starting the tutorial. These are now unlocked as the player progresses.
Checkpoint tiles have been added to the tutorial.
Blink Range upgrades are now purchasable in the shop.
Chests now drop knowledge fragments. The shop shows the amount the player has collected, but the player is unable to spend them.
Changed Features
Reduced the weak aether crystal respawn timer to 6 seconds.
Crackling Aether Orbs have been removed from the tutorial (for now), but are still present in the adventure.
Crackling Aether Orbs grant the player a larger speed boost.
Removed the Jump Height upgrade from the shop.
The Shop features all possible player upgrades.
Bugfixes
Fixed a bug where tiles have visual artifacts and occasionally gaps where two tiles should be flush against each other.
Fixed a bug where the adventure summary would not show when the player successfully completed the adventure, leading to a blank screen.
Fixed a bug where the ceiling detection wasn't consistent.
Known Issues
Stability bug: the game becomes unresponsive in the loading screen while world generation runs. The loading screen is not updated.
Gameplay bug: in some worlds, the player is killed before they've reached the bottom of the world.
Gameplay bug: navigating the shop menu using a joypad doesn't always focus the correct button based on the player's input.
Gameplay bug: very rarely, the character continues grabbing even when the trigger is released.
Gameplay bug: when February is outside the world line and gains stamina past her usual maximum, the excess stamina doesn't decay.
Visual bug: HUD doesn't resize correctly when the resolution changes and is bigger than 1920x1080px, resulting in text that is too small.
Visual bug: Keyboard keybinds are shown on the Steamdeck in the tutorial when the touchscreen is used to dismiss dialogue.
Visual bug: the world timer is misaligned on the player's HUD.