Malevolent Planet 2D - Paving the Road Ahead of TIme

Hello! This week has been a bit difficult for me, didn't sleep very well lately, so in order to not forget to post a status update for this week here we are.

So, the Patron builds for this month are already released, same with the public update. This leaves us with little to do except to continue the content flow and previous plans:

• Final Artstyle Change (hopefully). I'm working on updating the artstyle for the avatar sprites, and a quick preview can be seen in the attached image to this post!
• Chibi rework. There's plenty of feedback mentioning the current chibi sprites and/or the walking animations are a bit awkward, so I've been making some progress on that. The difficult part is that Photoshop is very glitchy when animating vector pixels and it makes everything a bit annoying. However, I am already doing well on the player character sprite and there's a new chibi which can walk in 4 directions, in addition to it being more detailed.
• Content work. I'm moving steadily with the next content following the crash, and in one update Ted and Alberto should be doing better, allowing me to work on making the ship freeroam accessible, which also allows you to see all the work I've done on designing the levels/floors of the ship!
• Art & Rendering. I have planned for a few motion scenes (scenes that include changes in the scene, such as the player character turning around but being in the same location on the drawing, which given the context can be fun and exciting) and I hope there'll be enough time and energy for some alien-related scenes in the September build.
• Bug fixes. I've received a few bug reports regarding the latest build and I fixed a few, so the next release will be more stable with the current content.
• Performance Optimizations (for all platforms, all quality levels). I have completely reworked the quality settings in Unity, because I noticed that on the highest quality setting the game was running 2-3 times better than on the lowest quality setting, which made no sense. I hope this will make the bugs some people are getting which are related to poor pc performance less likely to happen, as the performance should be greatly improved for everyone.

So that's about it for now. As you can see, I have kept myself busy and I even tried to do an unity engine update to the 2022 LTS but even though I cleared the errors, it was a waste of time as it didn't provide any benefits and it led to very strange bugs I don't have the patience/time to fix right now.

By the way, if anyone gets the chance and time, please send me a PM either on Discord or on Patreon with the websites you found Malevolent Planet/Malevolent Planet 2D on, as I noticed there are some websites publishing my WebGL version and I'd like to send a message to the people running these websites including better details on how to set up my game on their website in addition to the latest WebGL public builds.

Thank you for your time and I hope you're having a pleasant ending to August!