'Tis The Season To Be Jolly...

...oh wait sorry I got mislead by my local store, we're not done with the spooky month yet!

Version 1.12 isn't super big (I've had like, less than a week to work on it) but I wanted to get a seasonal level done in time for the holiday so I had to rush things out before I missed the chance. I'll probably not keep making them for every holiday - I kinda hate when a game breaks its own canon for some stupid costumes - but it felt kinda right since Burgertale already has a bunch of spooks and I've not really USED the darkness effect and graveyard props a lot.

So What's In the Candy Bag?

• New level: Trick or Threat! Celebrate halloween in style in this dark mansion with plenty of pumpkins to go around! This is the first level that requires you to solve a puzzle to access... a little taste of what's ahead! HA HA HA!
  • You can access this level from Castle Town, adjacent to the warp room. There's no crystal burger requirement to enter but you'll need the walljump or some other way to gain height.
  • For some reason I set the escape timer on this thing to over 7 minutes
  • (the reason is that I wanted to add a super elaborate secret path that would use up most of that time) (but then I realized I wouldn't have time to add it)
  • (how ironic)
• Fix the throws needed to get the last corkstone in Breathing Room out of its room being ridiculously precise, now it should 'just work' if you do the most obvious thing.
• Implemented an ailment system for enemies, and overhauled the one for the player to work the same way. Ailments now emit particle effects instead of just glowing your sprite, and weapons that say they inflict status ailments now actually do so. (Hopefully this makes it easier to tell what's happening if you're color blind too)

• Added previews of how much an item will recover when opening the food inventory, this means you don't need to trial-and-error items whose flavor text doesn't spell it out outright.
• Patched up the visible holes between wall and background tiles in Breathing Room with decoration sprites. I bet 99% of players won't notice small details like this but it was driving me CRAZY.
• New animation and momentum boost when reaching the top of a vertical windzone, so bobbing around at the top doesn't look like something is broken anymore.
• Small visual tweaks to some player particle effects (Reflection spell is less visually noisy now)
• New animations + particle effects for Frie when you carry her on your back. (Was getting annoyed at how static she looked + the dress ending with a perfectly horizontal line when jumping looking weird. Did anyone else notice?)
• Fixed the sign in Bread Ruins ~ Main saying "Explosive magic accident" when there's a major plot point Frie can't use magic, now it says "Explosive chemicals accident".
• Added 23 new accessories! (Not all of them can be actually obtained yet but they're in the game now). My focus for this new batch has been generic buildcrafting stuff ('boosts regular stat' kinda things), because so far it's mostly been funny situational special effects.
• Changed how messageboxes work, now you must release buttons before they can trigger a fast forward (which means you won't always instantly-reveal the first message in a cutscene if you run into its trigger). Intentionally skipping messages will be a bit slower but I increased the fast-forward speed by 50% to compensate for the lost frames.
• Misc new assets added for levels that I'm still working on, sorry for bloating the filesize UwU
• New secrets...

What's Next?

I'm back in a situation where I'm trying to do everything at once and don't know what to focus on next, but what I'm messing around with at the moment are:

• Burgerface's Domain
  
  • As of this update, the crystal burger total is now 19. Which is 1 less than 20, the number on that door in the Nexus warp hub. I might need to revise that door - my original plan was to keep this game short and only have 20 collectibles in total, but now I see that there's gonna be a LOT more than that in the final game (there's one outta five total worlds completed and we're already halfway to my original collectibles goal?!). Alternatively, my plan was to put a super hard gatekeeper boss there that requires you to have all movement upgrades for a fair fight - e.g. moves you need the walljump and slide to dodge - so that even if you go there early, you'll need to be really good at the game to enter the final world. And I'm not sure I'd want to make a boss like that when most of those things aren't even in the game yet. We'll see which of these routes I go with. (Obviously I don't want to make the final world until I've finished all the previous ones, so prepare for disappointment if you hoped to explore it the moment you have 20 crystal burgers in the demo)
• More shops for Castle Town, especially the accessory one.
  • Currently you can get something like 30 more carrotcoins than you can spend, and that's no fun - it should be the other way around! So I'll try to get the super accessory vendor in place (once I figure out a character design I'm happy with) which will let you get most of the standard buildcrafting stuff and some of the less story-related accessories. (You might've noticed I've tried a lot harder to put accessories in places where they make sense instead of just distributing random loot everywhere? Well that makes it harder to figure out what stuff the shops should have...)

• Shattered Citadel level
  
  • I already did a pretty sizable chunk of this level but most of the "fleshing out flow" work remains. It also has a large number of new enemy types which have their graphics finished but all needs to be coded. Not super fun but I'll need to get to it eventually. (This level has pretty low priority since it has an inaccessible entrance - the Nexus needs some work before you can properly explore this without dev tools).
• Movie world
  • This is three levels mashed together into one megalevel, and with a lot of story happening in it as well. I've done some work on its hub and figured out a lot of practical stuff (like how to give it a sepia + filmgrain filter without completely annihilating the framerate OR messing with the rendering pipeline) and drafted up the story for the three worlds, but the actual level bits I've not even started at properly.
    
• Nugget Mines plotline
  • I've drafted up the general plot for this area (just like Frie's it'll have branching endings depending on your actions) but figuring out how to make it work practically is gonna take a bit more time. Me making Short Desert as a way to get backdoor access into the Circus might've been the bad move here since it skips the entire "investigate the suspicious circus" arc, and I might need to tweak that a bit (e.g. making it a secret activated through a puzzle?)

That's all my plans for the moment! *hides super messy planning document while whistling innocently*

For the next update I hope to take my time and get ONE polished thing done instead of five hundred started-but-cut-for-time ones... but we'll see, knowing my track record there's probably some urgent bugs to fix.

Stay flippin', folks!

/Yal