Early v0.9.4 Progress | Patreon Weekly #109

Hey Patrons!

Firstly, there’s a new Patreon Poll running! Following the theme of smaller content for v0.9.4, I’m doing a poll on adding a few new traps!

Unfortunately, I’ve been a bit slow on work this week. I had my second vaccine shot early in the week and it knocked me out of commission for a while. Still, I do have some new stuff to share!

Ankh Implementations

Following from the Patreon Livestream posted up last week, I’ve done some polishing and finalizing on the new Ankh functionality.

Blessed ankhs now have new more prominent visuals, in addition to their new 3 turns of invulnerability:

Unblessed ankhs are more complex, and so aren’t quite done yet, though I do have more details on how they’ll be implemented:

• I’ve decided to let the player pick two items to keep, which default to weapon and armor, rather than forcing them. This opens up a bit more strategy, but means potentially sacrificing a lot for some utility.
• The player respawns in a random location from an unblessed ankh. This can put them next to danger, but they are granted a few turns of invisibility to get a head start. Ankhs no longer reset the level when they trigger, but do reset level knowledge.
• Against a boss, ankhs will let the player reclaim their inventory pretty easily, but the fight is still reset!

Other Work

Firstly, the iOS TestFlight grew quite a bit this week! There are now over 1,000 testers now, and so far the iOS port is holding up quite well! There is a single crash bug on my radar right now, but otherwise it looks like it’s rock solid!

Also, that A/B test I was running on the new screenshots went quite well indeed, with somewhere around 25% more installs than the old ones. I’ve decided to end the test fairly early and have rolled the new screenshots out completely on Google Play.

I’ve also made some major steps towards implemented the new music into the game as well! The new title theme is currently a single track, but the sewers theme has two segments and semi-randomly alternates them to keep things a bit more fresh. I’ll likely have a video showcasing this soon, but I want to wait just a bit in case there are any adjustments that need to be made.

Lastly, I also spend some time working on proper platform-agnostic text input using libGDX’s scene2d classes. It’s not much to look at yet, but I’ve successfully got text input widgets to render in conjunction with the game’s regular graphics and input functionality. This is the first step toward offering supporter features to iOS users, and other text input based features to everyone!