Well, the first build in almost two months has been pushed out to Steam. There's a lot of stuff to cover. I'll try to be thorough:
Release notes
- Updated to Unity 2019.2.3f1
- Added a new area to The Caverns of the Lost - The Crystalback Temple. The functionality isn't there yet, but this will be the area to open the gate to the first boss.
- Added a pushable mechanic. This feature will let Gen push and pull certain obstacles. Not completely finished yet, but there's a white square "block" that you can move around in the dev room to the left of the starting area.
- Added spawnable items system. Not fully implemented. There are orange placeholder squares acting as chests. Pressing the interact button while in front of one will cause it to spawn a bunch of random gems, coins and a non-functional weapon.
- Completely refactored how we're handling game assets. We've adopted Unity's Addressables system, which, while still new, looks really stable. It's a wrapper for Unity's Asset Bundle system, just standardized and much easier to use. Most game assets have been converted to this system, but a lot have not. Because of this, there are some known issues.
- The old Corruption Breaker room has been removed. We've decided to move Corruption Breaker to a later game stage to encourage late-game exploration of the world as a whole.
- The Title Screen has a new intro animation.
- Much more of The Caverns of the Lost area has been built out.
- The FoV of the camera has been increased. This gives the game a ton more visual depth and increases the parallax effect.
- Our primary shader is now using preprocessor directives for most effects, meaning we have to check a box on the material for an effect if we actually want to use that effect. While this saves on shader calculations and improves shader performance, it has caused the number of compiled shader variants to over 16,000. I suspect this shader loading is what's causing the brief lag spike during the Title Screen animation.
Known Issues:
- There is a brief lag spike at the Title Screen. I'm looking into how to fix it, but it's due to the number of shader permutations we currently have.
- Some prefabs, like the Luna Mirror and the Arrow's lightning effect, are being handled by the Addressables system. Because of this, they're losing references to non-Addressable assets, one being the Audio Mixer Group for their audio. This is resulting in the audio output for the Luna Mirror, and the other Addressable prefabs that have audio, to ignore the Effects Volume Control settings. These items will play at full volume until this is fixed.
- Because of the increased FoV, some environment elements look off and need additional tweaking and filling.
- Unity has not made the version we're using available for Linux Cloud Build. Unfortunately, until Unity resolves this issue, Linux users will be unable to get updated builds.
- The waves on water features aren't moving
- Attempting to return to the main menu results in the same level being loaded, but the Title Screen UI appears