Hi everyone, back for yet another update! Sorry for the long-ish period with no new content or word from me. Things have been a bit hectic, but hopefully what'll be dropping in the next day or two will have been worth the wait! So let's talk about these changes

Snazziness

There's been some adjustments made to the rendering code so now the appearance of the game scales substantially better for more resolutions. Aspect Ratio is maintained, color filters are better managed, and oh my god the texture scaling, it's perfect. No more weird one pixel wrap around errors or dithering or proportion distortion. Now, instead of scaling all elements and textures per actor, everything is rendered to a frame buffer with internal resolution, like is the native solution provided by frameworks like XNA, and the common technique used by other 2D game engines. The frame buffer is then and scaled appropriately to your decided resolution. This sacrifices sharpness slightly, but it improves overall quality ten-fold and does away with all previous texture errors associated with different resolutions. It also means I've restored manually resizable windows, because now no matter your resolution it won't look like absolute crap. There's additional snazziness elsewhere too. Title sequence has a little bit of decoration added, and now when you enter a dungeon it'll tell you your location and the name of the song track that'll be playing in the background.

Jazziness

The chosen music of the game has always been a point of contention for players. There's only so much that can really be done with creative commons music while trying to not sound like every other low-budget game. At the same time, there's a feel and atmosphere that is familiar to the genre and is expected with the territory that needs to be respected. As such, I've been looking into putting together more neutral soundtrack that should be less offensive to the general populous. This includes some more atmosphere and even jazzy/weather channel-like music for the main menu and more JRPG-ish music for dungeons and boss fights. And as always, everything is downsampled to at least try to give it a retro-vibe. And if you're worrying if this is going to make the game feel even more generic, don't worry, because that's the point. StoryMode has always been a satirical homage to the roguelike and JRPG genres, so having a generic soundtrack is all the better towards making it what it's supposed to be. If it turns out, however, that most people do not like the new music selection, I'll either revert the soundtrack changes, or I'll release the old pack as a free DLC pack allowing you to swap it in on-demand.

Anything else

There's the typical slew of bugfixes coming. Found some problems with input that should be fixed, and a game crashing bug when you craft the last item in your list. The settings pane now has a network configuration tab that allows you to set values such as your tombstone alias, daily dungeon url, and check what data you pull and send to daily dungeons and steam. That's all I can think of off the top of my head. Thanks again for purchasing and/or following Storymode's development and trying out the game. It always makes me happy when I check the daily dungeon server and see people's tombstones!

[ 2016-03-15 05:21:04 CET ] [ Original post ]