After receiving loads of valuable feedback during the Metroidvania Month rating period (big thanks to everyone who took the time to leave a comment!), we decided to invest a bit of time for a “small” post jam update.

The scope of the update got a bit out of hands, so here‘s a summary of everything that changed. 

Polish

We were able to clean up a few rough edges as well as making some of the in game labels pop out a bit more.

Also there’s now a pixel border around active interactive objects which should lead to less confusion when multiple interactive objects are nearby.

Checkpoints

A lot of of people said that the game not having checkpoints, lead to a lot of frustration. So we reworked the respawn mechanism and added checkpoints at a few key points, which can be activated like other interactive objects.

Enemy behaviour

Most of the enemies were updated, to make encounters with them a bit more fair. Most notably:

• Bats will stop chasing you and fly back to their sleeping place if you get far enough
• All enemies received an increased attack cooldown, to prevent unexpected high damage or instant deaths
• Slime enemies have their hit boxes disabled when they die so they can’t block passages

Controller support

It was possible to use a controller before, but in game labels (e.g. interact popup) were not shown correctly and throwing bombs was a bit unreliable. These problems were addressed and there’s an in game overview of the controls.

Disclaimer: The controller needs to be supported by the OS to work with the game. Otherwise you might need additional software to get it to run. We had success playing with a Nintendo Switch Pro controller on Windows using BetterJoy.

Bomb quick select

Bombs can now be quick selected with 1/2/3/4 (or D-Pad on controller) additionally to rotating through them with LMB (or L2)

Map

There’s now a map which shows all visited rooms, as well as the player position, the home position and the position of the active checkpoint (respawn).

Other changes

• Improved tilemap layouts to make traversing a bit easier
• Fix mushroom collision, which led to the player being push through walls
• Saving mechanism was improved to prevent unexpected data loss
• An in-game menu was added to go to the title screen or show the controls
• rename the “play” button to “new game” and add confirmation dialog before overwriting current save file
• Improve how overlapping interactive objects are handled
• fix certain gates and destructible blocks not being persisted
• regrow mushrooms belonging to a room if destroyed, to avoid soft locks
• fix bug where slimes continued to attack the player after being defeated in battle rooms
• limit rats spawned from nests to two active ones per nest