Woah, sorry for the short radio silence! Due to the holidays in November and December I decided it might be more efficient  to just do one larger release rather than two smaller, so thats just what I did! But I was hard at work on HEARTLIGHT! This update focused on primarily on three things beginning to develop and art style and setup the art pipeline, give combat some much needed affection and a look into the current performance of the game (spoilers it was BAD).

So let’s talk about the work on the art style. Most things in the game are intended to make developing art and  implementing into levels as fast and efficient as possible. All the assets placed have built in instance variation in order to give depth to the scene without the overhead on the designer. Along with this the shaders have started being developed (granted not yet implemented in all instances). This will allow for a more uniform style and better performance as less shaders - means less materials - means less draw calls.  In order to take advantage of this reduction in draw calls the level loading was also reformatted to optimize the and combine these assets meaning faster runtime and loading performance!

Combat will hopefully speak for itself when playing but the major update is the AI has been cleaned up and broken out into its own generic toolkit. The implementation in game is not perfect by any means yet but by the nature of how it has been rewritten it will be much easier to build more varied and bug free AI in the future. Other updates include now you can apply force to enemies as part of combo sending them into a ragdoll hopefully spreading out the battlefield a bit, better telegraphing on enemies and some camera adjustments.

Not too much to say about performance aside from some memory leaks were fixed, garbage get created and collected less frequently and some root processes have been optimized… sorry :3

Oh and don’t forget to check out the new Combat Simulator added to the launch menu! It includes some of the new art along with a way for you to fight any of the enemies in a controlled location.

New Features:

• Combat Sim Mode
• New Shaders
• Improve Enemy Telegraphing
• Improved AI
• Ability for level to take pictures of assets at runtime to create more dynamic effects like grass locations and terrain adjustments 
• Camera now lags in position slightly behind the player to make them seem faster
• Camera now moves during combat  to better highlight the action 
• Asset instance variation 
• Ability to apply force to enemies when they are hit
• Lots of bug fixes!

Known Bugs:

• Sometimes chests appear opened when they still have contents.
• Enemies will sometimes pathfind incorrectly or become unresponsive.
• Shadows occasionally pop in and out

Stay tuned because I’m excited for you to see what I am cooking up next!

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