Insect Adventure
Huge Update 1/31/22
First thing you should notice is the jumping arc feels better, and the melee combat feels smoother in general. Hitboxes for the hammer are bigger, animations are smoother and faster, bugs spray bug juice when you squash them. When you mash the attack button it feels a lot smoother how the hits rhythmically come out. A lot of repetitive sound effects have pitch variation which is a little thing that goes a long way, and overly loud sound effects have been tuned down.
As a more personal thing I wanted to get off my chest I wanted to make the rooms more detailed so I created a new background layer to place tiles in. Pretty much every tileset has something new going on in it. Areas that are meant to be populated now have homes dotted about, rooms that were sparse are now packed with detail. I went a step further in some rooms that I thought were a bit bland or had poor flow and changed their layouts to better incorporate an underused mechanic or make a new situation to be thrown in. This alone took more time than anything else I had on this update.
Lastly, I have listened to the you guys, the ones who are willing to provide feedback for this game both on the discord and here. There was a lot of suggestions made that I would've never came up with myself that make the game that much better, as well as a lot of bugs that me nor my friends never found that got fixed. I hope as I continue to improve upon this game, more people will catch wind of it and it will grow into a respectful community.
As a final word, I'm going to take a break from this game to catch up on other things and come back to Insect Adventure from another new angle. The next time I do work on it it shouldn't take over a month to implement, it will be more focused on performance and/or making a more detailed minimap. See ya.
Patch notes:
Performance:
-Changed the frequency the text files are loaded (used to be every frame), this may reduce chance of crashing the game
-Some sound effects play at slightly randomized pitches, for variety
-Some sound effects have been slightly tweaked to reduce irritation
Controls/Softlock Fixes:
-Jump arc is made slightly floatier and easier to control
-Added the ability to wrap around menus by pressing Up at the top and Down at the bottom
-Fixed getting stuck in a wall when you grapple on it at a high speed
-Fixed bug where you can teleport with the spider web by shooting at a sticky wall point blank
-Pressing the sub-weapon button after sticking on a spider web wall will make you let go instead of shooting another web
-Changed Sticky Wall augment's function to make it resemble a more simple wall jump style
-Nerfed how high you can bounce with the hammer pogo
-Fixed a bug with the cannon flower where you would get softlocked by super jumping while waiting for it to spit you out
-Fixed bug where you can ledge grab onto solid walls if you are within the space of a regenerating block
-Golden Leaves are nerfed
Enemies:
-Changed the way knockback works with enemies so they behave more naturally
-Nerfed boomerang's ability to hold off certain enemies as effectively
-Enemies can no longer leave the sides of a room
-Giant worms despawn properly
-Flying shadows no longer lunge out of bounds, giant shadows no longer spawn skullheads out of bounds, flying skullheads no longer lose their wings out of bounds
-Enemies now spray bug juice when defeated, sometimes on hit
-Some enemies have revamped death animations
-Hitstop effect applied for taking damage
-Queen Dragonfly has a new moveset
-The gauntlet near the end has some surprises
Graphics/Level Design
-Fixed jittering Bugsy's sprite sometimes does after interacting with slopes and standing still
-Polished Bugsy's 3 hit combo animations, there is a small hitstop window when you hit an enemy
-Made changes to basically every room in the game, some hard to notice, some rooms have radical transformations
-Added a new background layer for more graphical depth, rooms that were once sparse are now crammed with detail
-Fixed a bug with wall running animation, running up uneven walls doesn't interfere with character sprite's rotation
-Reduced the cost of a few augments
-Moved a couple augments and items around. An extremely obtuse secret now houses an alternate method of getting one of the more powerful relics instead
-Spikes will hurt you even while speed boosting, horizontal spike knockback works as intended
Suggest future updates!
A common consensus this game has is that it's rather unpolished, and as someone's first game made almost entirely by themselves I haven't had much of a second opinion to bounce back on other than the rather unhelpful generic "it's great" comments I got every now and then from play testers.
To me, "jank" means that it works sometimes but not all the time, but there's a lot of times where it feels extremely nebulous as to what kind of factor it actually is. Is it Bugsy's handling and general physics that should be looked into? What upgrades made it stop feeling jank? Or is it more to do with combat and I should change how the animations feel?
I'm inviting you to say anything as long as it's constructive criticism.
Update 12/2/21
-Added "Anti-Aliasing in Full Screen" option
-Made an incredibly obtuse secret more suspicious without giving it away