Version 4.0 - Locations Variety Peek

CHANGELOG:

• Two preset locations with their own save slots: Cave Garden and Tree House.
• Trotim's second in-game music track, played at random
• DearFox's lamp tile and few other icons
• Game now also autosaves game every 30 seconds, as well as when you uncapture mouse in HTML5 Desktop
• "Both" control mode removed, HTML5 version now asks to pick Desktop or Mobile before starting game
• HTML5 Desktop has in-game keybind to toogle mouse capture
• HTML5 version removes useless Quit Game
• Load Game option now present only if save file exists
• Added FPS counter, can be enabled from Controls options

BLOG:

In the previous update, I have implemented save/load system. It wasn't enough to give any interest, of course, so next I could either expand possibility or introduce challenge and limits. In this project I do self-exploration toward pure sandbox construction genre, thus for now I am expanding. Thus I have decided to give players a slight hint of objective: two preset terrains with ambigious naming, leaving it up to player to make sense of them. Let's see.

While I am fine with Tree House, Cave Garden is actually a disaster that I am leaving in as a learning experience. Game has absolutely no lighting in the game and bleak textures (that I have asked for) in order to give it more dreamlike appeal but it doesn't work when you are inside a tunnel made of a single texture. I also struggled with Godot's GridMap node as a tool. It's lacking a lot in controls and UX. Hard to move layers, no bucket, unintuitive copy/pasting, moving mouse too fast while holding a button means it skips steps. I sure wish I could hide other layers when working on one, especially after creating a mountain and wanting to change a middle. So even for 16x8x16 cube type of thing it's way too unfriendly to fill terrain. I could do it, but I rather find new tool and leave this be. Either external tool or somehow build levels in-game and import.

GridMap editor of course is fine for single layer or 2.5d stuff. Certainly not for sandbox chunks.

I have also been working on polishing and understanding HTML5 Godot experience. In particular, I have learned that players have very low trust to non-HTML5 on itch.io, so it deserves more attention than just demo. HTML5 Godot can't tell which device it's played on, so now it asks player to pick control mode at a start, while removing a very messing "Both" option that asked for too many hacks on top of "touch as mouse" simulation and just clutter. It was also important to allow player to control mouse capture/uncapture since at times in v3.0 mouse wouldn't capture while loading and there was no way to get back in after pressing Esc to get out. This has also given me a neat timing to implement saving on HTML5, doing so when mouse is uncapturing. Godot HTML5 can't auto-save if player simply closes the page, so you have to find a good excuse. I am not yet sure what to do on HTML5 Mobile.