Microvania News

[p]Hi everyone. With Frosty Games Fest now done (hello to our new friends!), it's time for another update. This patch ended up doing more than I thought it would. Most of these are from finalising the main game's world and features. Which btw, is getting very close to releasing![/p][p][/p][h3]Gameplay[/h3][p]- Feature: Map Screen now matches its colors to the terrain's colors (instead of generic grey).[/p][p]- When recharging health at a station, after a few seconds the recharge rate will increase in speed. So total recharge time is now much faster when you have lots of health pips and missiles. This speed increase does not apply for bombs, as there's so few of them.[/p][p]- When shooting a secret block, there's now a short sound effect to go with the reveal of the weakness hint.[/p][p]- When a bomb detonates, there's now a short screen shake effect.[/p][p]- The tunnel enemies will now auto kill themselves if they find themselves stuck for some reason. This mostly effects the main game, where there were some paths that was hard blocked if they got stuck inside a tunnel.[/p][p]- When you do a moonwalk, there's now sparks. There is no gameplay effect, just a small visual nod to acknowledge the existence of the moonwalk tech ;). I wonder if there will ever be a practical use for it...[/p][h3]UI[/h3][p]- Fixed the navigation between Cancel and Accept buttons in the Virtual Keyboard screen to be neighbours.[/p][p]- Fixed Virtual Keyboard layout: S and T were swapped by mistake.[/p][h3]BUGS[/h3][p]- BUG FIX: The DEL button on the Save File screen would run every frame.[/p][p]- BUG FIX: The Map Hint that appears after some time or after fast travel can remain on screen even after the button was pressed.[/p][p]- BUG FIX: Can't Ball-Dash in lowest grass terrain. This was due to counting that tile as terrain instead of as non-colliding tile.[/p][p]- Bug FIX: Ball-Dash couldn't dash through pick ups. This is now possible, though note that since it's technically a short-ranged teleport, you don't grab the picks when dashing through them.[/p][p]- Bug FIX: Potential silent crash when exiting to menu and playing the game again. This was related to a system from the full game that isn't really used in the Demo (though it's possible to trigger).[/p]

Hi,

I wanted to let you all know that Microvania will be participating in Frosty Games Fest 2025 this weekend from 8th June!

You can watch it on Youtube or Twitch. See below for times in your region:

• Australia: 9am AEST | 8:30am ACDT | 7am AWST (June 8)
  
• New Zealand: 11am NZST (June 8)
  
• Japan: 8am JST (June 8)
  
• USA: 4pm PDT | 7pm EDT (June 7)
  
• UK: 12am BST (June 8)
  

- Dreampunk

- Big performance improvement
There was a system created a few months back that ended up costing a lot to run, which in turn would cause either very low fps and/or inputs being dropped altogether (I can confirm that Jump felt unreliable in this case). I've refactored that system and reduced the CPU cost by 44%. So if you had some performance issues previously, please try again now with this patch.
- Any Map Marker's used in Map Screen will now show up on the top right corner of the game screen when you enter the room.
- Minor resource optimisation for Map Screen's markers.

- Dying on the boss will now respawn player to before entering the room. This was always an intended mechanic, I just hadn't gotten around to adding it till recently. The boss will feel a little harder now, but hopefully you've found enough Health Tanks to mitigate that! :)
- Added back the initial cannon fizzle (before obtaining Cannon upgrade), and instead made it appear more like a short puff of smoke. I recently had a playtester mention "oh, it looks like I have a gun, so why doesn't it work?". Which is a valid point! Adding the fizzle back in was the simplest solution here, as creating a new sprite without the gun is beyond the scope of the project at this time.
- Fixed hidden paths and lava to correctly show the player as semi-transparent when inside.
- BUG FIX: Pause or Map button required two presses first time in a session.
- FIX: Intel Macs accidentally unsupported in last release (sorry!).
- Bullets and Missile have new Physics Mass values. This was required for some features in the main game, but shouldn't have any effect in the Demo.
- Improvement to various systems and features from the full game that aren't in use in the Demo.

BUG FIX: Ball Dash can dash into the terrain, or through a pipe's borders.

There was a known "bug" where you can ball dash through the corner of a pipe to get inside it without using a proper opening, and also you can ball dash through a 'checkerboard' terrain pattern. This was kept in, as I thought it would make a fun exploit for speed runners (and I can always do the level design around this knowledge, so it wasn't too game breaking or something).

But recently someone found that you can also dash into a pipe from anywhere, AND also you can dash into the terrain (very bad, and definitely unintended ːsteammockingː).

So this patch fixes dashing into the terrain, and also fixes dashing through any pipe's borders. This unfortunately does mean the corner pipe exploit no longer works, but the corresponding 'checkerboard' terrain exploit still does. In the demo there was only one place this worked anyway, but in the full release I'll try to add a few spots where this can help speed runners.