Hey everyone!
Got another dev log update for you all. A lot has changed with Dewdrop since the last one. So many little quality of life tweaks have made the gameplay feel smoother, and more polish on the UI has helped everything come together like a complete experience. There's honestly so much that it's hard to decide where to start...
Let's kick things off with vine customization. Last time I introduced custom soundbanks, but I've since scrapped that idea and narrowed it down to individual vines. I always knew I wanted players to upload their own vines to the Workshop, but making people build a whole soundbank just to do that felt tedious. So instead you can now create individual vines, name them, and upload them straight to the Steam Workshop. This also came out of some other changes I had to make to the vine instrument menu itself.
Before, you had 7 sounds you could select and add FX to. If you wanted different vines, you had to switch to a new soundbank. The problem was that this didn't let you have separate FX per soundbank. Each instrument slot had its own channel and FX, so swapping the soundbank meant the vine in that slot inherited the same FX. To fix this, I decided to let you add up to 12 of any vine, which means there are now 12 audio channels each with their own FX. That should give people a lot more creative freedom. It also lets you swap out a vine you've already drawn with to test a different sound.
I've improved the FX panel too. Instead of always sitting at the bottom, it now pops up when you hover over the arrow icon above the vine slot. This makes it way clearer which vine's FX you're actually changing.
Along with the UI stuff, I've been working on the background shader. I added some nice highlights to the waves that give them more depth. I also fixed a bug on Nvidia GPUs where the waves had visual artifacts and jagged edges. There are also some subtle orbs drifting around now, slowly shifting color to add a bit more variety to the scene.
Another big one is I got rid of the points. I was going through the feedback people left in the Google form (which I'm super grateful for!) and it hit me that the point system didn't make sense to anyone and wasn't adding anything to the gameplay. So I cut it entirely, and honestly I'm really happy with that call. The game feels way more relaxing and straightforward now. When you finish a level you won't be interrupted anymore. It just says level complete, and you're free to sit back and listen to the beat you made while solving the puzzle, then hit continue whenever you're ready.
There are so many more changes I'd love to cover, but I think I'll keep those secret until the game comes out! I know the delay to September was a bummer, but I promise it'll be worth it. I'm starting the final playtest for the 50 puzzle levels soon, and after that it's just polish, so hang in there. You'll be bouncing around in Dewdrop before you know it.
Thank you all for the love and support so far! Join the Discord for behind the scenes and to share your creations with the community once the game comes out!