This is a small update, but necessary as a rather nasty bug was found.

Bug Fix

• Fixed logic that resulted in a particularly icky bug with the function that sorts dead vs alive adventurers in the party, which on rare occasions resulted in empty slots being put in place between alive heroes and dead ones (breaking functionality in certain menus)

Requested Features

• Added command line switches to mute music or sound: --mute-music and --mute-sfx
• Visual feedback : Party HUD now makes subtle up/down/left/right shifting animation when stepping forward/backward or turning left/right in the dungeon

Mini-blog: Notes and musings about the future of Jettatura

Recently I am in the midst of investigating options to re-create Jettatura in one of those "engines-in-a-box", because the nature of the very-very-spaghetti code I've written for the game's current ad-hoc "engine" makes it difficult to gracefully implement the current primary goal of re-structuring the entire GUI system to allow for implementing promised features such as mouse use, gamepad use, and support for printing Unicode fonts (which itself is a prerequisite for being able to support certain requested languages like Japanese/Czech/etc). Earlier this year I have tinkered with Unity for a couple months, but its editor is annoyingly crashy, and the way it interrupts to recompile after making every tiny insignificant change to an element has wrung my last nerve-fibers of patience through a paper shredder. Afterwards, I have recently been investigating Godot 4 as another possible option. I've remade a couple of my previous crappy "weekend sideproject" 2D puzzle games to get a general feel for Godot, and while Godot is far from perfect and has its own unique set of problems, I like it magnitudes more than Unity so far. Opposite of what I can say about Unity, it seems to cooperate with me far more often than it gets in my way. Also, Godot's 3D support is suitable enough for Jettatura's graphical needs. Perhaps most importantly: creating menus, windows, and custom GUIs -- which has been the biggest thorn in my side in Jettatura's native codebase -- is actually a very intuitive and pleasant experience. So, quiet as I have been this year, I haven't forgotten or abandoned Jettatura as a whole. But I have hit a concrete wall, of which I am likely opting to just invest time to plot a lengthy detour around, rather than dig through it with a plastic spoon. I don't have an ETA for how long this will take. Until that planned remake of Jettatura's codebase is done (whenever that may be), I will still prioritize fixing any future bugs that are found or reported to me in this lineage of the game. I also still plan on (eventually) publishing a GPL release of Jettatura's source code that nobody asked for, because why not.