Hello friends! 😄

This week.... We're excited to announce that WE FINALLY GOT OUR TUTORIAL WORKING! 😄

Okay okay... if you follow our social media, you'd say "Hey... didn't y'all already do that quite awhile back?" WELL! That "tutorial" was our spell book that teaches people how to cast the spells. This time, we actually got a full blown tutorial done! 😄

Tutorial Mode

For quite awhile now, our testers complained that when they first started playing the game, they had absolutely no idea what was going on, and there was little to no information available. They had to just fumble around till they figured it out on their own.

We totally agreed with our testers! But we kinda parked it and said "we'll get back to it later" Because we had like... 10 testers.... INCLUDING US hahahahaha

And let's face it.... Tutorials are REALLY REALLY HARD TO MAKE.

But over the past two months, our discord and social medias grew significantly 😄

People were actually downloading our game! AND PEOPLE WERE LOST WHEN PLAYING IT!!

So we decided it was time to just bite down and get through it.

Finally after a coupla weeks of planning and polishing, we can share it with you all! It's nothing impressive, but at least now everyone will know what's going on (:

As with all things, this is still very much a work in progress. At the moment, you will only be able to access it if you've never played the tutorial before. The dialog is also unfortunately, as of now, unskippable O:

We'll be working to improve these things in the next few weeks (:

Spell Caching

Next up, we decided to change our gameplay a little bit. Up until now, players would have to draw a new spell every time they wanted to equip it. 

This means that if you only wanted to shoot a dark blast spell, you'd would just have to draw the dark blast once and be able to keep using it. But if you wanted to shoot a dark blast, followed by a teleport, followed by an AOE spell, you'd have to very quickly draw the spell, cast it, draw the next spell, cast it, rinse and repeat.... IN THE SPAN OF A SECOND. 

I suppose there's a thrill in a challenging system like that. But the more we tested it, the more we realized.... ITS NOT ACTUALLY VERY FUN! In fact, it gets annoying after awhile!

In the next update, we implemented a spell cache! So that instead of only having access to the last spell you drew, players now have access to the last three spells they casted. 😄 This makes the game much easier to play, and opens up lots of possibilities for spell combos!

Simply tap on the spell icon to select it!

Just remember! Every time you draw a spell, it will push the new spell into the cache, and pop the oldest spell in the cache, so use this new feature with caution.

Bug Fix

Next up, I'll be sharing with you all an absolute disaster of a bug. A game breaking, server crashing bug. 

While testing the game two weeks back, I discovered that our enemy AI was not working as intended. 

It happened out of the blue, and we were unable to trace and track what changes we made which caused them to start misbehaving. 

Basically, these enemy AI are created for the sole purpose of hunting you down. 

They start spawning slowly at first, at the edges of the arena, and then they multiply and mob you until you cant hold them off and inevitably die, which causes the game to be over. 

But instead, they simply... stood still, right where they spawned. 

But since they did not hunt down the player, there was no way for the player to die. 

And since they spawned on the four corners of the map(and stood still instead of chasing the player), there was no way for the player to kill them fast enough. 

This would happen until there was so many enemies that the server would simply crash ((':

We dug and sniffed and dissected our code but could not find out what was causing the issue. 

In the end, we resorted to rolling back our code. 

But each time we rolled back, THE BUG PERSISTED O: 

IT SOMEHOW HID FROM US FOR WEEKS. 

Eventually We found a working version of the game... From two weeks back.

As I write this devlog post, the bugs have all been fixed by our in house wizard Suarvae.

Guys, if you ever choose to develop your own game, remember to TEST EVERYTHING REGULARLY!!! AND COMMIT YOUR CODE ALL THE TIME.

Daffodil Starlight