A major update is available for Vibrant Venture featuring five new levels as well as many tweaks, fixes and optimizations! Definitely the biggest update yet!
Please restart Steam if the update doesn't show up for you.

The new features and our future plans are discussed in the following video:

Also, here's the new gameplay trailer!

In this update, I rewrote and refactored major internal systems - basically things you won't notice unless you peak at the game's code!

For example, I spent about a week completely rewriting the enemy system using a much more scalable approach which has already proven extremely useful when I began developing new enemies for Alpha 5.

The reason I do this is to ensure a more fluid, long-term development process by preventing scalability problems caused by old code.

Outdated and poorly written code often produce bugs that are extremely difficult to fix, so I'd rather remake old code than constantly patch up bugs.
After all, this is the first game I've ever written, and I will gladly admit that the code I wrote during the first year of development was of poor quality.

Many games fall victim to this, as developers often overlook maintaining existing systems, however I do my best to ensure that even the code I wrote years ago is up-to-date and can scale with future requirements for the project.

I have learned a lot about object oriented programming this year at university and have incorporated those paradigms into Vibrant Venture's codebase to the best of my abilities, thus ensuring a smoother development where bug fixing doesn't take all of my time.

The only drawback is that I spend a lot of time redoing old things and not developing new features, however I believe it will ultimately be beneficial in the long run.

Regardless, I hope you enjoy the new update!

Changelog:

• Added a new level: 2-3
• Added a new level: 2-Bonus
• Added a new level: 2-4
• Added a new level: 2-Boss
• Added a new level: 2-C
• Added a new power-up: Iron Oyster
• Added a new enemy: Pokeprey
• Added a new enemy: Centeel
• Added a new enemy: Jester Shrimp
• Added the last part of the World 2 Map
• Updated various old sprites
• Updated Cardinal's Air Kick
• Updated the Level HUD
• Updated 2-2 tile visuals
• Updated lighting system
• Rewrote all enemies
• Rewrote music system
• Rewrote level HUD
• Rewrote and rebalanced the scoring system
• Rewrote major aspects of cutscenes
• Optimized and refactored multiple systems
• Fixed bugs