General Update #14

So as was mentioned in General Update #13 some circumstances changed for me that allowed me to spend more time working on the game. As a result this month felt very long for me, which was good, because I was able to get a lot done. I've been looking forward to compiling all the work for this update and while normally I'd spend some time talking about the individual changes I've made I feel this would just be too long a post if I did that. Instead I'll try keep things bullet pointed and brief.

- Death animations were implemented. Some bugs appeared regarding respawning but this was resolved with shorter death animations.
- Entrance hall was populated with more enemies and some issues came up regarding that, but they were also resolved.
- Work on sound began and was implemented. All enemies and the player now had access to sounds, as well as ambient sounds for areas of the castle and music.
- Mapping of the next area of the castle has already been done, this will be the dungeon section of the castle. It'll be more mazelike and condensed than the first area with optional paths.
- H animations for the current enemies were finished, each animation now has three phases. While they currently have little variance asides from speed and pauses, I do plan to animate some more noticable changes in newer H animations.
- UI improvements were made to the mashbar. It has a couple quirks that are easy enough to fix going forward.
- A critical bug in the game was resolved, this being the movement halt on any kind of attack. This has opened up opportunities to provide more interesting attacks.
- A pause function was included with a small pause menu.
- The way scripts initialize on startup was adjusted to prevent errors, this mainly being the core script not initializing before the enemy scripts, which would cause errors in their code.
- Work on new enemies began, first of which being a maid that uses melee attacks. This new enemy is also the testing bed for a parry mechanic.
- Work started on the Player's new kick attack which will be used primarily for parrying other attacks. Plans are to include an air variant and a crouch variant of the kick.

That's most of everything I think. So now I can talk a little about going forward.

While I am very reluctant to make promises I will state that I would like to have a build released every month. I don't know just how feasible this will be for me but it will be the goal. As mentioned elsewhere each new build will be patron-only, and every new build after will make the one before it public. I could have made the latest build a patron-only one but I felt that I really needed to first let people know what to expect of the game and making people pay to figure that out felt like it was in bad taste to me.

For the coming month I'll be hoping to implement the parry function and have a total of four new enemies made and included within the next area of the castle. If time permits I'll also start work on a main menu and save function. And if time even further permits... I'll look into H animations involving more than one enemy.

As always a big thank you to those of you supporting the project, as ever it means the world to me. Stay safe.