Greetings, everyone!

After countless hours of hard work (we literally don’t keep track of the working hours), we’ve reached an internal goal version: 0.3.2. And, since this is technically a dev blog, we will take the opportunity to start posting a changelog.  What is  a changelong? Basically it is a record of all the changes that took place from version to version, which is useful to show what we have been working on, and it also to help us keep track of the changes in each version. So, for this and future changelogs, it will go like this:

 

WHAT’S NEW in 0.3.2?

-New GUI

Now the GUI is pixel perfect. It is not finished yet, but is looking much cooler!

-Pause screen improved

The pause screen is a very important part of the game. It helps you keep track of your mob’s units, it shows your heroes and the amount of each kind of unit. So we put some more work into it, moving forward with the major overhaul we started in version 0.3.0.

Also, we updated pretty much every other window of the game. The “game over” screen, for example, now shows you some stats, and the config window is almost fully functional.

-Help window (temporary)

Until now we had been sending a few versions of the game, along with an attached .png that briefly explains how to play. In this version, you can access a little window with the basics of the game by pressing the universal F1 (Thanks @danielben for the idea).

-New destroyed buildings, improved fx

Well, that. The previous destroyed buildings where not cool. After some playthroughs with the new ones, we realized these are not perfect either, but with a little more work, they will end up pretty cool! The particle effects we use to show damage have also been highly improved and they are almost final.

-Difficulty!

Okhlos 0.2 was incredible easy. To be fair, we hadn’t focus on difficulty or adjusting numbers until this version, and we only did it very lightly now, but you can feel that Okhlos is much more challenging than before!

-New units!

Now, the Prophetai summon little minions who have melee attacks. The Hosioi are still here but they are an altogether different unit. We also improved the animations of the Gryphons, and we call them MechaGryphons (technically, I call it that way).

-New Heroes!

We added a few more heroes! Heroes are on of the most fun parts of Okhlos so far, and in the upcoming version we will be adding LOTS of them! Also, we’ve adjusted some of their prices, so that it is now harder to buy many of them at one time.

-Units don’t have backs

Until now, when units moved away from the camera, they showed their backs. We are changing this, so that they always face the camera. Only the units in the mob, mind you, not the enemies, they will still show you their backs (they are that rude). You might think that is not cool to do this, but we think we can take the liberty, and in this way you will have a better reading of your units.

FIXES

-Minor optimizations

By default, the sprite system that we are using keeps animations running all the time, even when the sprites are not being rendered. We have lots of animated sprites throughout the levels, like the grass or the trees, so we were spending precious milliseconds animating hundreds of these that where outside the screen. However, we couldn’t simply set all sprites to stop animating while outside the field of view because we have objects which behavior depends on animation triggers.  For example, the Prophetai only summon their minions when the summon animations reaches a certain frame, that works as a trigger. The solution we came up was adding a new property to animated sprites that lets us set if we want them to continue animating outside of the screen or not.

Asides from this, we set the quality settings of the build to a lower level, with fewer camera effects and lower resolution textures. Thankfully, you can hardly tell the difference.

-Bug fixing?

There are lots of bugs. Totally expected in this stage of the project. Sebastian destroyed his fingers solving lots of bugs, so now you can totally reach the end of the game. Before this bug fixing, it was very usual to not be able to finish a single city. I keep telling him to program without putting bugs, but he does not listen to me.

 

SCREENS

(Click on them for the full pixel art glory)