I will now recap just some of the things that happened to the project since it was Greenlit.
There were massive changes compared to the public demo, and first gameplay trailer.
First and foremost the movement speed, jumping, and falling speeds were adjusted, as well as the "hard landing" state removed, these changes helped a lot to make the movement feel much more liberating.
Second I hired an actual artist to create new portraits for all characters, and npcs. Some of it can be seen on the screenshots, but Saragat got an even better portrait now. I am really happy about the portraits, as they were one of the common complaints from the demo.
Currently my main focus in development is to "draw" and finish all of the game's areas. This is a time consuming task since there are a lot more areas, they are a lot bigger, much more complex, and the game is not tile based, but instead uses hand drawn maps for each area. This is a dynamic process since some areas are getting changes, and things shift around as I have more ideas to individualize each area.
At this time I am finished with half of the mandatory areas that the player must traverse to finish the game. So roughly 1/3rd done of the whole game, however I can now focus on development full time.
My aim here is to make each area feel unique not only in looks, and enemies, but gameplay focus. More on this in later devlogs.
Music is much more plentiful. Unlike SiS where songs were mostly delegated to bosses, now almost every area has it's own music track, with the exception of a few where ambient sounds take priority. So if you liked the music in SiS, you'll be happy to listen to a lot more of it in Usurper.
That's it for now, I will try to show some non spoiler gif's and images the next time, but since discovery of the world is one of the main aspects in a Metroidvania I will restrain from showing the maps here. If you want to see them tough, you can look at them at out official twitter@pugware.
If you have any questions, or suggestions, go ahead and share them, either here or there.