It's about time for a little update. In the last 2 months we didn't make a lot of proegress regarding the maps; most work was cleanups, improvements, and other background stuff that unfortunately doesn't yield good screenshots. Here's a few, those who hang out on IRC have probably already seen them:
^ Bird form is now fully implemented and replaces dual form. Doesn't allow for much height, but allows to cross large horizontal distances very quickly.
Long-distance walljumps included of course
^ Forms pimpin'.
There has been some more work on GLSL shaders:
^ Experimenting. Also known as
Vectrex-modeTM.
I don't see an actual use for this but it's been a good exercise.
^ Some more poison effects.
^ The volcano area is hotter than ever.
^ Left: Original. Right: Contrast enhancement and light amplification make up for a lacking vision in the dark.
This already does sonar that is reflected from enemies and shows their position.
To support all the changes that have been done, the main menu had to be replaced.
This doesn't work usually but with a few tricks and a lot of glue code (home-made UI library ftw!) we can now change almost all rules of the game.
To name a few:
- In theory: Support to cook more than 3 ingredients at once. In practice: Nobody can remember recipes that complicated, so we'll keep it at 3
- Completely scriptable ingredients (Scroll up a few posts for the drunk pic. Yes we have whiskey now that makes drunk when used.)
- New food effects (such as +defense, +regeneration, +energypower, ...). We're looking for ideas for new food effects to add so if you have one, shout!
- The limit of max. 8 ingredients per type is gone. Now each item has a weight and there's a global weight limit of how much can be carried. Some planning ahead will be required what is best used where.
- Ingredients and costumes are no longer separate, and each costume will have a use or an effect. We're still figuring out how to improve upon the other collectibles system -- home decoration is nice but it could be better.
^ The menu looks almost like the old one. Note unlimited stack size and the other changes.
^ Because each character has a different set of abilities, the old song menu page had to go and is now instead shown on the group menu,
which replaces the help screen (Did anyone ever read that wall of text?!).
With the help screen gone, there's now space for a list that will keep track of things that have happened or that might happen in future.
^ Frances kept poking me to code the puzzles UI so I finally implemented that yesterday.
Expect this one to be one nasty puzzle.
^ Quick prototyping session with
Christianx42 on IRC.
Not sure yet where this is going. Prototyping!
On the other news...
After being
a horribly lazy slacker busy for a while, Diablodoct0r has picked up work on the story again, but no details about that at this time.
Something else is going on, too:
https://soundcloud.com/naxcilliac/freefall-aq 
(thanks, `Nax!)
That's it for today, stay tuned.
