Arena of Suffering News

[p]I've been trying to update the shop system (on a totally safe build that never goes live). And you know what--it's incredibly hard. Harder than our graphic overhaul, harder than making a basic particle system, tougher than weather. I just don't know why shops are so hard to do well. It's been kicking my butt royally. Message me if anyone has ideas on how to make this easier. Either way, there's no way it'll make Next Fest and it's probably next GAME material anyway, lol.[/p][p]In more fun news, I wanted to show off one of the bosses from our Demo. This is the first handsome fellow that you'll go up against in a serious fight. He's a brute, but he loves puns and can't be all bad.[/p][p][/p]

[p]Only 7 more days until Next Fest! I updated our screenshots and Title page with more recent artwork, and I'm really happy with it. The old intro screen had always seemed thematically fine with me but a bit bland. This one pops more.[/p]

[p]Only 12 more days until Next Fest. Our testers didn't have any trouble with the demo (please drop me a line if anyone else does!). I'm hoping that we'll be able to spend some time developing new plugins while we wait for our publishing date. Does anyone have requests for things that they'd want to see in either an expansion post-release or in the next game that I make? My biggest personal push has been to make a new weather system, and progress on that is going very well. I don't think it's something that'll make it into Arena, but anything we do after this should have more than the basic rain/snow that's built into RPGM MZ. Right now we have spores, dust, sandstorms, and fog too. Fun stuff![/p]

[p]The Demo is through with approvals, and it should be live and running now. Please let me know if anyone has hiccups with it. :)[/p]

[p]Arena's demo is going live today. It needs to be ready for Nextfest, but I thought it would be awesome to have it ready for anyone who still wants to try things out now. Except a number of quick patches throughout the day as I test and get any final bugs out of the way (there have been a few). I'm still working on a scrolling text issue. By tomorrow, it should calm down a lot. Take care! :)[/p][p][/p][p]EDIT: 9-18[/p][p]When I said going live today, what I should have said was going live (for me), getting some awesome bug fixing done, and not realizing that Steam has an approval phase for Demos even if the main game and store are already greenlit, lol. So, the public-facing side of the Demo is going to take until early next week. But I played through the whole thing yesterday, and every blip we encountered got squashed, and there weren't many "Hmmm, that's not right" moments. A major sound problem that's been a thorn in my side is now gone. Environmental sounds grow and fade properly with distance. Before they were . . . eccentric.[/p]