The Escape From Limbo Update - GGG Dev Log #11

aka The Return To Development update aka The How Did This Take So Long update.

In all seriousness, this update should have come out a year ago and it IS a bit embarrassing development getting sidetracked for this long, but that's just life.

No need to get into the weeds of everything right now, but I did move so that was at least one of the major distractions in the last year.

For the update itself, we have a nice overview video if you'd like:

https://youtu.be/0qhNlBzb1Dc

Otherwise, here's the gist of it!

For starters, I decided to finish the rest of the graphics for the obstacles and guns, they look a lot better now and I'm much happier with how the game looks.

And of course this means they now all glow very nicely in the dark as well!

And along with the models and textures are also the rest of the explosion variants for all of these as well. All of these visual changes/completions apply to the boss fight too.

This isn't the only visual upgrade, originally the core change of this update was going to be a UI overhaul, and we did indeed complete that. New visuals, new fonts, new Tutorial screen, better navigation...

And of course a more immersive level select you can move around in and select levels through!

We had shown this level select off right before the development hiatus, but that was just a mock up and not functional yet, so getting it working was a big part of getting back to development leading into the update! The various pegs light up when unlocked & beaten, and you can probably guess all the empty space is for more levels later.

You can also see a little difficulty gauge for the level, and several badges that you get that show you if you've beaten it in One Life mode, One Health mode, or gotten a Perfect Clear.

Character Select and the mode selects are still there, just in the next menu that opens when you select which gauntlet to play.

Speaking of character select, we haven't added any new characters or gauntlets in this update unfortunately. I didn't want to delay this update any more than I already did, so I focused on keeping this a Quality of Life update. The next update will be back to new content, we have a partially complete new character and new arena in the works!

Aside from UI, we adjusted some of the controls and game balance. There are a few "advanced" controls such as braking, strafing, and a slow movement button you can set, and also the ability to seamlessly swap between mouse, keyboard, and controller which previously had some problems.

We wanted to encourage players to engage with the Combo system a bit more, 1 second was too short to make any deflecting to destroy objects reasonable for combos, so we upped it to 2 seconds. In later gauntlets players wont be able to rely as much on the Point Capsules (Or I suppose I'm calling these Combo Capsules now) for consistent combo, so we need to make sure that feature is reasonable when attacking too.

The Combo Capsules also now have proper physics, sliding and bumping into things. This was both a balance choice but also necessary for some of the weirder later arenas to work properly.

Spinners felt underwhelming as obstacles, so these now have slightly different physics and can even deflect bullets to bounce them around the arena!

Also aside from other misc fixes, the one last thing worth mentioning is we were forced to finally update our Unity version to keep development going. This was not a fun process and caused enough issues that it did tack on a good bit of extra delay to the update, especially with how much of a motivation bummer it was. Newer Unity seems to have issue with audio syncing, so we've been struggling to get our music layers to stay synced and still find ourselves fixing edge cases. There were also plenty of new physics bugs to solve, including an awful one that took forever to hunt down that caused the player to spontaneously combust! (I'm not even kidding, they were taking phantom damage!)

Problems, delays, everything aside, I'm glad to finally get another update out despite it all.

I can't promise we wont hiatus again, life's full of curveballs, but I insist I wont abandon this project! Crabs can just be a bit slow sometimes... right? I've just got to learn not to hide in my shell so often along the way.

Anyway, game's probably gonna be set on sale for the next week or whatever now that we're back. Maybe that'll make up for anyone waiting to get it.

The full changelog, for those curious:

v0.7.1

- Seamless swapping between Controller, Mouse, and Keyboard works properly now.

- Added advanced "Brake", "Strafe", and "Slow" controls.

- Adjusted default controls, possibly more comfortable for keyboard?

(Controller is still recommended.)

- Increased Combo countdown from 1 to 2 seconds. (For better focus on combat-based combos.)

- Added visual to signify active Combo.

- Most visuals are now completed, including all obstacles, guns, and their explosion effects.

- All obstacles now have proper glowing effects, more visible in Dark Mode.

- Added Fancy Lighting option, with slightly more immersive lighting.

- Added new features to gauntlet generation & polished code.

- Rebalanced gauntlets slightly to include new features.

- Improved timing of boss cycles.

- Improved Infinite Mode boss logic.

- Added more bonuses, including a First Completion Bonus.

- Music now reacts to Power Ups.

- Highlighted UI is now more visible/easier to navigate.

- Overall UI overhaul, including updated fonts.

- Escape key now exits menus.

- Added new work-in-progress Tutorial screen.

- Updated Spinner obstacle physics. Now deflects bullets.

- Combo Capsules are now physical and bounce around. This is both a balance change and needed for future updates.

- Small tweaks to various obstacles.

- Bit the bullet & updated from Unity 2019 to 6000, subtle upgrade benefits.

(This put the entire update into limbo due to several bugs... Including major audio and physics problems.)

- Various behind the scenes prep for next update's features.

- Fixed intro ignoring audio settings.

- Fixed issue with boss cycles not starting correctly.

- Fixed Spinners not spinning both directions.

- Fixed Position-based VFX not displaying.

- Fixed timing issue with music layers. (Hopefully.)

- Fixed music not resetting at start.

- Known Issue: Engine issue means Alt-Rotation for keyboard needs set manually.

(Looking into if this has changed since we last checked.)