It's the final alpha demo! Wowee!

Outside of any newly-created issue in this patch that I may quickly need to revert, this is the last alpha demo build.

What does that mean? Well, this is my first week of working full-time on the project, and for the next little-over-a-year I'll be purely focusing on the full game. I've had nearly 12,000 downloads of the alpha demo, and a colossal amount of great feedback and bug reports, and at this point it's extremely rare that someone reports, well... anything new.

So, I'm going to be leaving the alpha demo be entirely, closing the bug reporting channel on Discord (after another few days, just in case), and switching to only focus on the main game rather than maintaining two versions of the game concurrently. There's a lot of things that need some refactoring, and in honestly it's quite a hindrance to development to not be able to take anything apart (else risking it being too hard to export a new demo build). I also really, really need to reorganize the game file folders to be more manageable long-term, which will likely temporarily break a lot of file path dependencies, and I just do not want to juggle worrying about exportability until I'm ready to again.

In a lot of ways, I actually can't start working on the full game until I'm sure I won't be maintaining the demo anymore - so this is me tying off a very big loose end.

Are there still bugs in the current version? Of course! And things I wish I'd polished more? Most certainly! But they're bugs I can live with, and as far as I know there isn't currently anything that would crash or softlock the game, randomly ruin a speedrun, or generally rain on a player's experience. Yeah, some peanuts can talk to you when you're outside their house and things like that - it's not a big deal. Let that be a main game development thing to tackle when I build better tooling for creating conversations.

Once the game is close to its full release, I'll be giving beta access to Kickstarter backers who pledged for that reward of the main game, and at the same time releasing a totally new (and still free) demo that covers roughly the same area, but with updated everything as well as some actual Ducklands content and other stuff, so that there's a demo that represents the final product.

We're still around a year out from that, though. So I'll keep the devlogs coming, but no more game files for a long while.

Thanks for being part of the journey!

Version 0.1.09 patch notes:

You are required to start a new game due to fixes in version [09c].

• Some combat/enemy changes
  • Waking Fossil's fire projectiles now stop their timer when paused, so you can't pause and let them despawn before unpausing every time the boss attacks.
    
  • Waking Fossil's final phase projectiles shoot in slightly larger angle intervals.
  • The Golf Mote's move speed wasn't desync'd from local FPS, so it was possible to trick it into walking much further or shorter than it was supposed to. Fixed.
    
  • The Golf Mote's leap reaction area was shortened, and it will wait slightly longer before leaping. This should make it accidentally jump when you dont mean for it to less often, and will give you slightly more time to get out of the way.
  • [09c] Quick fix to Golf Mote's out of bounds action triggering multiple times and racking up unfair putt counts.
  • If you stand still during the Little Lord fight, they'll aim right at you. (Previously LL's early phases were set to always target you plus a random offset, which meant standing still would trick the boss into not attacking you directly).
  • Slight change to Little Lord's mid-fight immunity attack, so that the boss will try and lead its shots if you're moving. This should make the phase more interesting than 'just walk in a circle', and can create larger gaps to dodge through that make the attack more consistently dodgeable and less unfair.
• Speedrunning-related fixes/tweaks & long-term QOL
  • Moved the "Continue" button above "New Game" so you can't accidentally launch a New Game by double-clicking on the "Play" button.
  • There is now a New Game button that allows skipping the opening cutscene.
  • A speedrun timer now exists in-game. The timer's details are:
    • On a new game, the first WASD input you do once you gain control of Blue starts the timer.
    • The timer pauses every time the game is paused or the player does not have control.
      • I don't think this is how speedrun timers commonly work in other games - because it's going to pause during eg. certain parts of the save animation, or when you cross screen boundaries. But whatever - I'm not big on following the common path. What this SHOULD mean is that the speedrun time accurately reflects 100% of the in-game time the player is actually responsible for, and ignores anything outside the player's control (equally across all player experiences).
    • The timer permanently stops the first time you defeat Waking Fossil, at the moment you defeat them.
    • The timer maintains 5-decimal seconds accuracy behind the scenes, but it's only going to show h:mm:ss when running. If paused, including after you beat Waking Fossil, it'll show 2 decimal places of seconds. If you really need more precision than that, well... all 5 decimal points are in your save file, but personally if you've "beat" someone's score by 0.001 seconds I don't think that's meaningfully different.
• Demo presentation & packaging
  
  • Updated a bunch of language and art related to the Kickstarter, to now acknowledge that the campaign is over.
  • Itch now hosts a zip file right than a direct executable, so that I can include a readme with the game.
  • There is now a GLES2.0 build of the game available publicly (previously I had these available privately and should anyone need it, I just gave them the link myself). In the interest of not having a million download versions on itch, it's linked in the readme should anyone have that issue, since it's quite uncommon.
  • Cleaned up pause screen a little (the Backspace one, not the Esc one)
• Misc
  • You can no longer pause and quit to title during a boss' explosion sequence to trick the engine into staying at a half-speed timescale.
  • The Magic Bridge can no longer be scryed when it is invisible/inactive (and green particles won't show up).
  • Fixed one of the Peanut Village wall tiles missing a collider (ie. the reason that magic bits from the LL fight occasionally got stuck in the wall).
  • [09c] Blue's hover ability particles were active for no reason. Just turned 'em off again. Whoops!
  • [09c] Lore entries were not being properly overwritten; loading from death or from title screen didn't forget anything you'd scryed without saving, and starting a new game didn't reset your lore book. To ensure things get set back to the default correctly, I had to also force a new save folder for this version.

There are a few known bugs I'm just leaving. They're either non-problematic, extremely uncommon, or have a direct and simple fix. Anything in that last category is now mentioned in the readme.