As I write this, we're approaching 2,000 downloads, which is just crazy. It's about 200x my original hopes for demo playtesting and feedback, and still doing a consistent ~175 downloads/day. We've also had 5 Let's Play videos and are at Day 11 of being on the itch.io frontpage. Honestly, WOW. I'm so utterly, utterly blown away by the response.

That said: We're also experiencing some technical/hardware-related bugs that I'm not well-equipped to troubleshoot. A few people have reported that they get a "grey screen" on playing the game with some monitor displays. Unfortunately, to be transparent, I don't have a particularly technical background and I'm not sure why this is. I'm clearly in need of a reliable technical resource I can speak with about some of these problems, but for the time being I'm just relieved it's only happening to 3-4 people out of a thousand. I hope to tackle that better in the future.

Otherwise, I'm leaning into content again, and I'm holding off on non-critical bugfixes for a bit as that can turn into a bit of a rabbit hole. The game needs more technical polish, but in the interest of still making progress, bugs that aren't problematic are going to sit pretty low on the totem pole for at least a while.

0.3 patch notes:

• Peanut Village first pass
  • General layout complete; end of demo text has been reworked to exist within signposts.
  • Houses have been added! More houses will unlock as you proceed through the game. I'll still need to change the variety here so they don't all use basically the same sprites.
    • It's obviously still in development you guys, I know it's weirdly sparse !!
  • Test items have been removed from the game again. I've gotten some early feedback and from here I'll keep them just for beta tester builds. (Beta testing not happening yet - but it will be! Join the discord if you're interested in getting involved in it once that starts)
• Combat readjustment
  • Values have been doubled - instead of 5 player health and 1 player wand damage, it's now 10 and 2. Ditto for all enemy health and damage. This will allow for a little more fluctuation in difficulty - a stronger attack can now deal 50% more damage (3 damage instead of 2), rather than the bigger 100% jump of 2 instead of 1.
    • Water will, in a future patch, deal 1 damage for falling in it. This prevents using drowning as a means of dodging enemy attacks (or pits as well). The setting will be disable-able in the assist menu.
    • Dust Mites (the baby Dust Motes) still do 1 damage, to reflect their smaller size.
    • Something I want to call out - I'm aware it's hard to tell what your health currently is at a glance, and changing from 5 -> 10 max health and making most hits deal interval-of-two damage makes that tougher. I'm thinking on it. I really like the visual look of the potion bottle, but perhaps I need to find a way to supplement it somehow. One of the reasons the Zelda game's heart system for health works so well is that a heart is actually worth 4 units, but players THINK it's worth 1 - I want the potion bottle to still FEEL like 5 units, and that's not something effectively being communicated at present.
  • Slightly increased magic meter refill rate.
  • Added a small additional magic meter by the mouse cursor. I'm not sold on this yet; it feels distracting. May be better above the player? I'll leave it like this for now.
  • Enemies that drown or fall into the water will be considered 'for real' dead, and will not respawn on your next entry into the room. I thought that was a fair way to handle it, but it was too hard to communicate clearly and created confusion. This will better reward players for tricking motes into jumping in the water, anyways, and I do still need to improve the water avoidance AI for dust motes in particular.
  • Increased time Health Pickups remain before flickering out of existence. (5 seconds -> 8 seconds)
• Minor tweaks and fixes
  • Invisible "6th star" removed from the game. (Whoops!) There's only supposed to be 5 in the demo.
  • Magic meter stops refilling while paused.
  • Rare bug where title text on main menu shows up as black boxes fixed. Turns out the image for each one was a slice from a 13,824x128 size spritesheet - in hindsight, shouldn't have been surprised some computers couldn't load it! They're separate image files now.
  • Edited the basic dialogue font to make asterisks more readable, and to customized some glyphs.
  • Magic Bits now bounce on water instead of sinking.