Last week we made a major update: the entire room layout for a new biome that we're calling "New Forest" until we come up with a better name.

New Biome

This week we worked on three main things:

• The aesthetic for this biome, which included not only making concepts and assets for the backgrounds but also a change in how we draw the terrain: we were using Tilemap assets which the artists found difficult to work with to get the results they wanted, and we switched to 9-slice which is much more intuituve for the team to create beautiful hand-painted terrain

• The new enemies and platforms that will appear in this biome. We had ideas for platforms and some proofs of concept of enemies that we had already implemented beforehand. So this week we focused on implementing platforms ad polishing the enemy PoCs. 
• The art for said enemies and platforms. We started out with some concepts and we already started working on some of the animations. In order to progress more quickly, we're taking advantage of opportunities to reuse animations for similar enemies. After all, other games like Blasphemous have enemy variations that only change color palettes. We started with reusing the "AimPew" (this is the name we've been using since it was just a PoC) animation to do the "Homing Pew"  animation. As the name suggests, the difference is that the second one shoots homing projectiles instead of straight projectiles.

- So what art changes can I expect to see in this update?

So far we decorated just a few rooms as a test:

• The first room of the new biome
• Three other rooms in the middle of the biome where game design used the new enemies and platforms. Try to discover them!

Game saves

With this new update, you'll be able to save your game on Itch! As we add more content, the total play time gets longer so it became necessary to implement it at this point. We'll be testing it but please let us know if you experience any issues.

Custom keybinds

This week we failed at delivering. User SirNicknm commented to ask for custom keybindings, which had been brought up to us before. Our boss fcarrone to prioritize it this week. But things didn't go as planned and for today's deploy we're only halfway there. Today we're adding customizable keybindings only for the main keys:

• Jump
• Attack
• Parry

Asset quality improvements

We improved how assets are loaded so that they don't show up pixelated.

And that's it!

We hope you enjoy the new biome as it develops.

Please leave a rating and comment if you like it, it helps us a lot!

Thank you as always,

The Dev Team 😸