With our content update (see our other event for more info!) and a sale, we will have our stream up again!

-Fixed a rare bug where the player could get softlocked after beating a dungeon.

-Changed how the prologue progress is done, including game tutorials/explainer and introductory dialogs.

• I'm very excited to share that Bean Beasts will be included in this year's Tiny Teams festival - an event celebrating small development teams.

• New Music for world 2, 3 and 4 (remixes for the 2nd half of each world).

• Added "+3 Beans" and "+All Beans" buttons to the upgrade panel.

• Entrance smoke and path indicators now flash red when an offensive enemy will appear.

• Finalising and testing translations.

• A couple of music tracks need finishing.

• Final playtesting.

• Bean Beasts now blink on the loading screen.

• Some enemies in world 4 are slightly more valuable.

• Enemy value reduction for Beast Mode is -10% instead of -20% for World 4 only.

• 2-9 Targets for challenges reduced to 30 (flipper) and 100 (burn) from 50/150.

• 4-2 Challenge amended to "hit enemies will all elements/status" rather than a single enemy.

• Added more players to the Play Testers credits.

• Swapped levels 1-6 and 1-7 so you unlock flipper before the map which requires flippers (1-8).

• Fixed an issue causing the game to not start with the correct language.

• EnemyInfo achievement no longer counts World 2 Boss.

• Overlapping spider bug on 3-9 has been fixed.

• Fixed a graphical issue with Henge.

• Henge no longer flashes when flying enemies pass over it.

• Improved magic blade animation.

• Frog can now target/fire when in the well on 5-1.

• 4-8 Fixed incorrect gem being removed when challenge is failed.

• Enemies no longer slip past chicks/bone warriors.

• 4-9 / 3-1 challenges renamed to "Do not use Abilities".

• Fixed the "boxes spawning with 0HP" bug.

• Large enemies no longer getting stuck when hit with Crab's ability.

• Centred the Beast Coin on the "Beast Mode Unlocked" Notification.

• Tutorial now correctly swaps Rider for "Bow" when replayed.

• Fixed some mis-aligned text with the Spanish translation.

• Corrected Stumpy's recovery animation (stopped the jerky foot steps).

• You can no longer click on a tree just after it's destroyed (and lose the icon - gamepad only).

• Fixed a bug meaning the gamepad icon could disappear if sticks were held down while map re-loads.

• Fixed wave counting issue for 3-4, wave 3.

• DTMG now saves the high score after each wave and when quitting.

• Top-Left tile is now clickable for DTMG.

• Fixed issue with cannon bullets not spawning correctly on sliding walls.

• Fixed red indicator problems for lots of levels (thanks to @iggi for logging them).

• Mud Pits and Henge now correctly flash when disabled.

• Fixed the Ballista sliding on rock issue.

• Fixed the translation bugs for the Generator info page.

• Fixed the issue with lightning misfiring against small fast enemies.

• Volcanos now damage correctly when a map is reloaded.

• Fixed the problem causing enemies to snap into nearby water tiles instead of the lava.

• Resetting via the settings menu now correctly wipes DTMG and tutorial progress.

• Bean Beast secondary reset no longer happens on a new wave for Boss or Endless maps.

• Beast Mech no longer makes a noise when a map reloaded.

Thanks for taking the time to read and showing an interest in my game, won't be long until I can announce a release date! ːsteamhappyː

Cheers,

Josh.

Anxious Noob.

This update brings about a few quality-of-life updates for recent new features as well as important bug fixes, as well as a major content update!

Hyoketsu Prison Released

Hyoketsu Prison is a joint military prison located in the Rain Country. It is an asylum for those who have committed crimes against the fragile peace in the Ninja world.

Hyoketsu Prison is an actual location within the world map. When you are done serving your time, you will be able to walk out the front gates.

This is the first version of the new Prison. There will be more updates coming to improve it, such as new items, missions and even potentially a full quest line. But for now, you can be arrested and sent to Hyoketsu Prison.

NPCs and Soap Bar art was done by our Luhan

Environment done by myself (first time doing Nin art in awhile)

• Bounty is now displayed on Ninja right-click menu

• Bounty Claimable is now displayed on target HUD

• When a map's boot map is set to itself, it will no longer show house option

• You must complete most of your daily missions in order to vote for Leadership Approval Ratings

• Reduced window padding of Target HUD to take up less screen space

• Added new Bat Wing Icon

• (Admin) Added Permission for editing player crime

• (Devs) Improved Map Linking Interface

• Fixed Missions Displaying in Mission Offers Prompt even when they are out of your level range

• Fixed Leaping not working (regression from last update)

• Added better crash error handling to various parts of the game

• Removed HtmlAgilityPack dependency as not used

• Fixed a crash to do with displaying Steam News

• Fixed picking up items ahead of you not working (regression from last update)

• Fixed crash caused by opening Skin Color Changer

• (Hopefully) Fixed a crash to do with compiling shaders on Mac

• (Devs) Fixed Map Linking Offsets

• (Devs) Fixed Map Resizing Layout

• Unlike [Jump] action, you can now climb slope with ladder while being hungry, tired, thirsty.

• Fixed a bug you cannot mine nodes.

• Improved speech bubble for npc.

• Unlike [Jump] action, you can now climb slope with ladder while being hungry, tired, thirsty.

• Fixed a bug you cannot mine nodes.

• Improved speech bubble for npc.

• Trying out reduced turning amount based on speed. Should make steering less sensitive at high speeds.
  
• Slightly increased the hitbox size of pickups and shield towers

• Moved Hint Bubbles to a HUD panel instead of world panels
  
• Added icons for bits, datapaks, and shield towers

• Added skybox to all levels (for real this time)
  
• Fixed drift snake particles still showing at max charge

• Fixed kiosk mode start button
  
• Fixed incorrect level select buttons

Hello, Pergonauts! Welcome to another Tuesday dev blog for Dandelion Void. 

This week we’re offering a work in progress peek into our character creation system, as well as discussing our philosophy of iterative game design.

Player created characters are common in survival games, and with our focus on user customization we are no exception! We’ve actually had a modular character system for a while, but this week is the first time it’s been wired up to the main build.

When testing Dandelion Void, developers now spawn as one of these six presets.

Dandelion Void has an extremely specific aesthetic. Our textures are full of crunchy pixels that don't get bilinear filtering. Our texel resolution is fairly low, which when combined with the isometric perspective, evokes the look of vintage pre-rendered game graphics. Visually, we draw from the mid-century modern and brutalist movements.

Character creators are a balancing act. The player should be able to make a unique avatar that they can identify with, but you also don’t want the range of outputs the tool generates to look out of place against the other game elements. A photorealistic human with anatomically perfect proportions would certainly clash with our lo-fi presentation!

Our solution is to render a few character design elements in an extra stylized way. Notice how while the ribs and muscle definition of the characters are fairly detailed, the eyes are just big blocky rectangles and the body hair (see the legs and chests) is drawn in a checkered lattice? These elements “anchor” the created characters within our core visual motifs, so that no matter what body shape, hairstyle, gender presentation, or skin tone the player chooses, their character always looks like it belongs in this game and in this world.

The next step for this system is to add in a starter wardrobe for these guys, as well as hairstyles beyond “bald” and “mullet.” While the ship launched in the '70s, it's not quite that '70s.

It might surprise you to learn that we’ve had this character system for months, but only connected it to the main build this week. This is due to the nature of our production process. 

We organize ourselves using a sprint-based “scrum” methodology and a playcentic design process. In simple terms, this means: 

• We plan our development tasks in units of 2-week “sprints”

• At the start of each sprint we talk about the state of the game, and decide the tasks we want to work on.

• At the end of each sprint we make a special build of the game and play it together 

• Our goal is simple: each of these sprint builds should be significantly more fun to play than the one before!

The strength of this system is in the frequent playtesting. Every game developer has had the experience of losing months on a feature that sounded good in their head, only for it to flop the first time someone else played with it enabled. The advantage of testing so frequently is that we get immediate feedback about whether or not something is working, and can change our plan accordingly. This rapidity is why some call this framework “agile.”

At the beginning of a sprint, it's good to start with tasks that represent longer term investments; our junk system described in the last post, for instance, is a unit of new content that took us days to design and implement. Towards the end of the sprint, when we are doing daily group playtests, we pay special attention to easy wins and low hanging fruit; little bugfixes or bits of polish that can be done quickly while giving us a lot of bang for our buck. 

Believe it or not, wiring up the characters was one of those low hanging fruits! You see, Brian actually built the backend of this dynamic human system months ago so that we could show multiple characters in the trailer. It even includes support for sliding between different body shapes and weights.

But creating the UI “frontend” for authoring a character – all the menus, sliders, camera angles, etc. – is a whole separate task that we haven't been able to justify putting into a sprint, as our current focus is on improving our core gameplay systems and mechanics.

With that said, we got a little sick of being the same person every time in our playtesting. So we settled on a compromise: the character creation UI can wait for later, but in the meantime, a simple Lua script will spawn the player as one of six random character presets. This was a textbook “easy win”: – all we had to do was wire up a system that already existed, so it just took a couple hours, but it improved our end of sprint build significantly.

We hope this little look into our planning process has been interesting! Please do look forward to a snapshot of the character creation UI in a future post, once it's the right time. We can't wait to see the characters you'll make!

Hello! We continue to regularly share news about the development of Xenolocus - a game where every step can be dangerous, and the darkness hides many secrets.

Prepare for an unexpected attack at an unpredictable moment!

We continue to tell you about new features, updates and interesting moments from the development process.

Follow our news, subscribe to our social networks and add the game to your wishlist so as not to miss anything.

Thank you for being with us!

https://youtube.com/@Xenolocus