Insect Adventure Demo News

Going to keep this short and sweet. I finished renovating the game, the only thing I have left to focus on is outside the scope of the demo, so unless there's a major bug or crash, I will stop updating the demo and focus my efforts on the retail product. Thank you all for your feedback and support! I anticipate a spring release for the game. More news in the form of updates will be brought here for the status of the game.

Patch notes:
-Intro cutscene is finished
-Lizardman cutscenes are finished
-Fixed bug where you would get damaged every frame if you got knocked back, landed on the ground, and fell into subsequent damage zones
-Balanced enemies on Nightmare difficulty
-Achievement notifications have been made with the option to turn them off
-Title screen options and menus are optimized/updated

First off I have to say that the process of planning and launching a retail game when you're an inexperienced one person team can be very rocky, with lots of things blindsiding you and ending up searching difficult to find answers to common questions.
Very recently Clickteam released a new Multimedia Fusion update specifically made to counter antivirus false flagging, and I'm using a new option to unpack the .exe. The results were extremely effective, going from 7-8 devices false-flagging to only 1, which is called BitDefenderTheta. If you are using BitDefenderTheta and it claims Insect Adventure to be a virus, or any other antivirus has issues with you trying to open the game, choose an option to make an exception for the game.
On my end, I was not depending on Clickteam to make an update that'll magically fix my problem for me. I have done some research on behalf of the antivirus false-flagging problems some users have commented upon, and it seems to be that the be all end all answer is to simply get the code for my game signed. Doing so would cost a lot of money and given that I'm easily less than a year away from finishing it, I'm going to wait until I get the final retail release to get that version of the game's code signed.

I am sorry if this causes any inconvenience, I have been using this demo not only to get the word out for my game, which has been a labor of love, but also to build experience in learning and managing a real retail game.

Other notes for this patch include fixing up the code for all the demo's bosses and a couple minor bugs fixed. I'm temporarily removing the game's start sequence as that has some minor bugs in it at the moment. The next update will include cutscenes with brand new updated art.

-Made walljump and web swinging movements a lot smoother
-Fixed Mantis and Spore Dragon's AI
-Enemies can now drop consumables
-Text appears at the bottom of the screen when you get an item with cutscenes off, or grab a dropped consumable
-You can now see what an item does before you buy it
-All that needs polishing left are the second two bosses, the cutscenes, and the achievements on this demo.

Here's my gameplan for the coming months:
-Finish the above and push out a final update for the demo.
-Focus on the endgame bosses, make the game finishable.
-Finish all the art for the later game cutscenes.
-Go back and provide polish in the later game areas.
-Polish all the rest of the bosses.

Once that is done the game will be ready for release. But I won't be finished once the full game releases. I have plans for additional game modes and mini campaigns, such as a boss rush and randomizer. The first release of the demo was really rushed and I felt kind of embarrassed once I looked into it, but I hope that those who stuck around have noticed an improvement of the quality of the game as time goes on. I hope those of you who are enjoying the game now are having as much fun as I am turning this into a polished, finished product!

Part of a huge coding overhaul I'm finishing up before working on the penultimate bosses of the final game. It's almost finished but there seems to be a lot of "whack a mole" type of issues where one thing gets fixed and I immediately notice more. The game is slowly but surely getting into a less janky state, for sure.

-Rolling and web swinging are a lot smoother
-Wall jumping has more polish and has a heftier feeling to it
-Hammer pogo is a lot more stable and doesn't require you to hold both Jump and Attack to use
-Pause menus have been redesigned and use a lot less memory
-You only have to use the Left and Right movement keys/buttons to switch menus
-Map menu is it's own separate menu, accessed with the escape key or the button to the left of the pause button on a controller.

First of all I want to say thank you to over 100 of you for downloading Insect Adventure's demo!

This update changed a lot of internal logic on enemies, they should no longer clip through walls. A lot of enemies behave more intelligently and (hopefully) more fair as well. Some enemies like bees had an unintentional "super armor" effect when attacking, now you can swat them with the hammer and boomerang at any moment to break them and other weaker enemies out of attacking. This is part of a much larger code overhaul that goes over everything in the game. I've been working a few hours a day on the game trying to get it the best product it can be since the last update, and I think burnout is finally catching up with me. I started working on the penultimate boss, but it seems there are always things bringing me back to look over thoroughly. Hopefully when I get the entire code overhauled, I'll only need to go back to work on graphics, which will be my goal when I get the final boss finished.