So many changes!. After two months of work is fantastic to see such large list, now the game is more stable, pretty and developer-friendly to new additions (have you downloaded the source code?, do it now!). The previous release had an incredible rushed development (JAM deadlines are terrible), so this release advocates on fix all those broken corners hoping to serve as a reliable foundation to future improvements.

Anyway, here the most important changes since v0.1-alpha:

Gameplay:

• New backgrounds in a proper pixel art style. The previous ones were images lazily scaled down.
• Same treatment for the game title, and now using a new typography (Archivo).
• New pause menu. Now the game don’t quit abruptly.
• Damage during an attack is show in screen.
• Added a missing frame in Kuro.
• Balanced actions and actors (enemies/heroes) stats. If curious you can see them here for actors, and here for actions without having to inspect the code.
• Enemies number was previously calculated in a linear fashion (first encounter: one enemy, fourth encounter: two enemies, eighth one: three…). Now it follows an zigzag pattern, adding a period to breath between action.
• Measures against difficult enemies appearing more that twice.
• Adjusts on the HUD and panels appearance.
• “Hold” action in an actor now shows in purple on the time meter.
• Messages dialogues using milliseconds rather than frames to count the display time. Resulting in the same behaviour on faster and slower CPUs.
• Fixed English typos.

Under the hood:

• In the code a new way of handle actors, personalities and actions. Three new concepts in this release (and horribly mixed between files in the previous one).
• Simplified game draw commands, previous release included tons of repeated lines scattered over multiple files, making it illegible.
• Enemies number and possibilities to appear in a encounter are now calculated at runtime. Before, the game relied on a precomputed table that didn’t scaled well and added complexity to the compilation procedure. A single command now compiles the entire game logic.
  • This required add a new module to handle fixed maths.
• Amount of RAM destined to sprites grown to 128K (a fantastic addition considering that i386s uses a segmented memory with blocks of 64K).
  • A new memory pool is handled by the engine, all this transparent to the game logic.
• C game-logic code now passes strict compilations checks (in modern compilers).
• New commands to draw vertical and horizontal lines.
• Fixed potential soft-locks in actors states.
• Fixed a dangerous bug in the engine commands table.
• Lot of tiny optimization here and there.

What is next?

I have two tentative features for the next release: add an inventory with items (and the ability of use it in encounters) or, add support to modern platforms like Windows and Linux. Both changes are huge, so is better to complete them right now in the early days of the project.

Hope you enjoy the game!.