Beta build v0.6.1x2 - Ground Pound and some development updates

Next beta build is here with the new ground pound ability and a couple others, and the polls for the next powerup are officially closed - the winner being gaseous erruption!

If you don't care about behind the scenes info, you can stop reading here and go play the latest build. Otherwise, keep reading for some news about development going forward.

So in short, I GROSSLY underestimated the amount of time the augment mass/ground pound ability would take - I had about 2.5 days planned out for it, 2 for animation and the half day for coding. This seemed reasonable, as up until now I've been adding roughly 3 abilities a day, thanks to how simple it is to add abilities that are just stat changes and multipliers. For the ground pound ability, instead I only barely got the ability into a viable state today immediately before uploading this build, meaning the ability took the better part of the last 2 weeks since the previous build was uploaded. The ability itself ended up taking 30 new frames of player animation (with way more new key poses than normal, which take 3-4 times as long as animating in-betweens) and a few FX animations, which ate all of last week and half of this week, with coding and SFX work making up the remaining 2-3 days - all of this, and I still know I'm going to have to do a lot more polish and tuning work on the ability (currently it doesn't cause knockback to the drake, costs no stamina, can be abused in gameplay, only has 1 upgrade level, etc). And of course, I had much less testing time for bugs.

Basically, I realized very quickly what it's like to work in a game studio under a deadline that doesn't provide enough time for proper polish of features, and what that does to the quality of a game. This rushed development also opens the project up to a litany of potential future problems and bugs due to lack of optimization and such - and moreover, there are numerous auxiliary features I'm constantly running into that I want to polish while working on the intended content for an update - I've always done this in the past (which is part of why the changelogs end up being so massive) as it allows me to keep all systems of the game up to date and working well with each other, for all sorts of purposes from quality control to optimization to polish.

Currently, this all has me at a week behind the current production schedule I drafted after the previous build, and as such there are not nearly as many new powerups in this build as there should be - generally this schedule offset is not a big deal, but I'd be a fool to assume that this won't ever happen again. If I've missed the prediction for how long this one ability took, it's likely there are a couple others that'll end up being a lot more work than anticipated too. 

My reason for telling you all of this is so that I can keep you all as up to date as possible on what's going behind the scenes of development - you're all generous enough to donate to this project on a monthly basis, and I don't want it to appear like I'm just pocketing the money and taking things easy in the meantime.

Going forward, I don't yet plan on adjusting the production schedule I have set (which aims the next public release for the end of February), but it's very possible I will need to. I still am aiming to have new beta builds every 2 weeks, but the amount of new content each will have will probably vary. And in the event that a new beta build DOESN'T come out on that 2 week schedule, don't worry - odds are there's still some partially dissected code or animations I'm touching up or bugs I'm fixing, and I'll have it out within a week of the originally planned date. Anything longer and I'll post something here to explain what's going on.

The goal of all this is to reduce some of the more intense development stress I've been having these last couple weeks and to allow me to keep working on systems and parts of the project as the project demands, and not as the schedule demands to make a better game overall.

Thanks for reading, and thank you all again for your continued patience and support!