- Ragdolls are now automatically removed after 100 are on the screen. This number would never occur in normal play, but it is good to have to prevent all possible lag.
- Dropped weapons are now automatically removed after 100 are on the screen.
- Renamed dolphin to Delphinus. Delphinus makes more sense for Greek mythology. She was a dolphin that helped Poseidon, and in return he placed her amongst the stars (as a constellation).
- Added a "hotkeys" command to the console. It displays possible hotkeys to press.
- Tested the new lightning with gamepad to ensure it works as intended.
- Blocking dragon's fire with your shield now does a lot more damage. It is now the best way in regular play to deal damage to the dragon (except for the legendary weapons that you aquire after beating new game+).
- You can now hover your large club over the camp fire before entering the hydra's lair to transform it into a torch. Also changed it so that the number of hydra's that spawn will be different based on if you have a torch or not. This balances things out.
- Fixed a sound bug that caused the normal thud/ragdoll death sound play when hitting an enemy with your boat, even if ragdolls was disabled.
- Some Laomedon feathers could drop outside of the player's reach at the edge of the screen. Feathers will now always be attainable.
- The player could press "Ctrl" on the final level to cause the screen to shake. This was for the developer for when I was testing screen shake system. I have disabled it for "release" mode.
- Added a fun new secret on the level, "Ahoy!".
- Fixed bug that caused "New Buff Available" popup to not go away after collecting the new buff.
- Fixed bug that caused death sound to constinuously play if the player had Invinicibility enabled and kept taking fatal damage.
- Added the Shop section to the Arcade popup. It contains the t-shirt and will one day contain other merch.
- Updated the cover art's final form in the credits. It was the older non-crisp version.
- Added the t-shirt designer to the credits.
- Updated all of the game's patch notes to have updated images. It now shows the patch name on each patch image.
Herakles and The Princess of Troy
Patch Notes - 2020.05.09
Patch Notes - 2020.04.11
- On king's tower level, the missing scenery "back" blocks felt off and so I made it level.
- On King's Tower level, when doing lightning, if no block is underneath the mouse, the lightning will summon all the way to the bottom, making it look strange as you can then see the top of the lightning sprite/image. It now will create at the top of the HUD as the lowest point. I did not yet test this with the gamepad and will do that before the speedrun patch.
- During Chaos and Hades modes, on any level with snow trees, the scenery randomizer would not randomize them into something else. This was because I did not code them into the scenery randomizer. I have enabled snow tree to randomize now into any of other 7 tree types.
- Reduced number of times to catch the bunny to 2. I did a lot of testing and decided that 2 times to catch the bunny will be best for speed runs. This way if 2 people were speed run racing each other, if one did not go for boots and one did, the one who went for boots would be "chasing" the other speed runner. This would make for an exciting speed run race. Both ways are pretty close and balanced.
- Player now received an alert when a new buff is available to find
- Updated the game's image on IMDB to be the new cover art poster
- Updated the game's image on speedrun.com
- Implemented a Troy palace portal trick. On that level, you can now perform a trick in order to create a portal at the bottom of the level that teleports you to the top. It's a lot of fun and just another fun secret in the game. To learn the secret, go to the game's discord and ask.
- I tested if faux inner blocks could improve the speed of game at all. I tested and found no noticeable improvement in fps.
- Moved higher quality fonts to Polish patch
- Moved compiled intro video files to "Included Files", which will mean it doesn't need to get built by client and will use those files instead of extracting them.
- I implemented a more advanced system for summoning bone allies from lightning. It used to be that you simply kill enemies to charge your lightning. You could then summon a lightning bolt and create a bone ally. This is still how it works if you have 5 or less bone allies. Once you have 5 bone allies, any additional lightning charges will be orange and will not create a new bone ally for you. It will instead empower your 5 existing bone allies. This increases their health, armor and damage. Once your 5 bone allies reach 2x normal strength, they turn yellow. Once they reach 3x normal strength, they turn orange. And once they reach 6x normal strength, they turn dark grey/stone. This allows the player to save up some lightning bolts to try and create stronger bone allies that stay alive a bit longer. It is more fun.
- Bones no longer heal a fixed amount of health. Bones now heal based on a percentage of the recipients health. This makes it more useful the more powerful a bone humanoid is. From a single bone humanoid, the bones generated will be able to heal 20% of another bone person. So if 20 bones are made from a single bone humanoid on its death, each bone would heal 1% of another bone humanoid. If the bone humanoid receives a bone and is at maximum health, then the surplus will be added to its maximum health. In this way, it is actually possible to heal super strong bone allies.
- Max lightning orbs to be displayed on the screen is now set to 55. This is more than enough for anyone. Additional orbs can still be generated by killing enemies, but they will not be displayed. I chose 55 because in a 4:3 resolution, 56 would overlap the enemy portrait.
- King's bow highlight origin was off. I fixed it.
Patch Notes - 2020.03.09
- Herakles t-shirt is finished and now available from heraklesgame.com. I will advertise it at a future date in order to attempt a reverse-marketing strategy. In which people will find the shirt, like it and then search for the game. Next patch will have the Arcade Popup include a Shop tab. It is already created, but I just need to enable it.
- Set up SEO for heraklesgame.com. People can now search for it and it will show up in search results more easily.
- Finalized the cover art and uploaded its new high res versions all over Steam and heraklesgame.com
- Demo mode's hydra difficulty has been reduced. Easy and Very Easy have 1 hydra. Medium has 2 hydras. Hard and Very Hard have 3 hydras.
- You can now close the console by typing "close". Previously, you could only close it by pressing ~ again.
- You can now grab an arrow while it is dropping.
- On the tutorial, some of the "Key" text would jitter. This was caused by a fix that I did for another patch that rounded all x,y variables before drawing text. Flooring the x,y variables fixed this.
- Arrows not dropping through blocks was a suggestion. I increased the collision box to be same as the hit box for when it needs to deal damage. So, only the grey/stone part of the arrow can hit a block to stop it. This is so that at different angles, the arrow doesn't stop midair.
If I do pixel-perfect collision, it could work as expected, but I am trying to avoid using pixel perfect collision since it can hinder performance is not very efficient. The hitbox has been increased, though, and was previously a single pixel on the stone part of the arrow. The wooden part of an arrow will still fall through blocks.
It looks strange for an arrow to be standing up from the non-stone side. For this reason, we need the hitbox on the stone side. - Updated heraklesgame.com with shop/t-shirt
- Updated beckergames.com with shop/t-shirt
- Extra glow on weapon and item highlights
- Set up image template for patch images to include the patch name on the cover art. It is used in this patch and will be updated for previous patches in the future.
New Soundtrack System Implemented
I also updated the Herakles soundtrack's album art. Check it out on Soundtrack's own Steam page!
Patch Notes - 2019.12.16
- Fixed the randomize characters checkbox depth. It was over top of the settings popup.
- D and A keys on OST screen now work as they should.
- Updated unlimited Arrow Buff with new artwork. It previously just said "temp".
- Improved the arcade popup's divider and it is now better looking.
Patch Notes - 2019.12.06
- Smoothed weapon and item highlights/glows. I may add additional glow in a future patch.
- Changed Demo and Classic Hydra water to blue (instead of green/poison). Tried different blue colors and decided the original blue is still good.
- Changed Classic Graphics blue water to be a solid blue to fit more with the solid color scheme.
- Lined up and centered the demo and classic level complete text a bit.
- Hitting shift (or gamepad left bumper) to was enough to trigger the "Move Boat" tutorial complete. Now it requires you to actually move the boat to complete that tutorial.
- Classic and demo modes now have water splash effect and sound. Classic graphics still does not have the splash effect.
Patch Notes - 2019.12.01
- Classic mode wasn't showing all of the tutorials, even if you don't skip the training level. Now it will correctly show the tutorials unless you skip the training level.
- Red power bar for bow now correctly shows the classic sprite instead of the normal sprite.
- Removed a very dark pixel that stood out on the column sprite
- Adding a debug overlay option in the console, under bug commands.
- Added weapon selected highlight on the HUD for Classic Mode.
- Updated Tentative Patch Schedule
Classic Graphics Update has Arrived!
- Added Classic Graphics to Classic Mode. You have the option using a Checkbox, as well as pressing “Ctrl” at any point while in Classic Mode. Performance and gameplay should be identical. The only difference are the graphics. You may get a hiccup in fps while switching between the 2 because of the resource/texture swap.
- Added system to my game for swapping resources. This was required to get Classic Graphics into the game.
- Created new images for Classic Mode that were never in the 2006 version. They are stylized just as the 2006 images were. I reused many other images that were already in the 2006 version.
- I benchmarked the game using various settings and improved performance by 17.2%. This was mostly due to changing SleepMargin from 1 to 15. I also tried going from 25 texture pages with an average file size of 3.2MB, to 2 texture pages with the average file size of about 40MB. Having less texture pages reduced the number of texture page swaps, but I discovered that the performance was actually still very good with more texture pages, as long as they were somewhat organized. On my personal computer, the larger texture pages showed some issues such as a white screen on startup if Steam was also running. So, I decided to keep the old texture pages because of the white screen bug.
- Added Options.ini file, located in the game’s folder with herakles.exe. It allows you to alter some further settings for the game to increase compatibility and sometimes improve performance. These settings are listed below.
- Ragdolls is now the default setting
- Celestrial background (glower/sun) is now the default setting
- Skip intro is now the default setting. Older computers would show a black screen for 5+ seconds before starting the game for the first time.
Options.ini Settings:
- CreatureTexturesOnDemand
0 = Default/Off
1 = On. Helpful if your graphics card can not utilize the built-in texture pages properly. Turning this setting on will reduce performance, however. Should only be used if you can’t start the game without it. - AlternateSyncMethod
0 = Default/Vsync
1 = A Windows Only alternate method to V-Sync. May result in more consistent performance. This sync method will disable frameskip options in Settings because it is not compatible with it. - VertexBufferMethod
0 = Default. This is the default method and is the one recommended by Nvidia - it should give the highest performance.
1 = This is a deprecated method, poorer performance on newer machines
2 = This is a legacy method, performance is poorer than the other two, but it should be compatible with almost any machine. - SleepMargin
15 = Default (Most optimal performance)
1 = Previous value. Not recommended. Decreased performance.
Other values: 5, 10, 20.
Patch Notes - 2019.09.13
- Fixed a bug that caused the demo and classic mode's music to not start playing. The main theme would simply continue playing because of this.
Classic Mode Update is Now Live!
- Implemented Classic Mode. It is accessible through the Arcade popup.