It’s a small grab bag of updates this week. I realized after doing some work recreating rooms from Eldritch last Friday that I wanted some sort of greenery to punctuate the stone textures, like the pixel ivy from the first game:
My texture generator wasn’t built for doing much more than hard, rectangular surfaces; but I was able to wrangle a mossy texture I’m pretty happy with:
I also remembered that I need to explicitly opt lights in to being “fog lights”—for performance reasons, that’s not the default—and a big one I’d overlooked was the light on the dungeon gates:
Before:
And after:
Much nicer.
I revisited the “ghosts” stuff I’d worked on way back at the start of this year, and added a few quality of life features. There’s now an option to only see ghosts of your friends, not random internet strangers; I expect this might be nice for groups who want to stream together without having randos popping in. And I revised how the option works so it has an immediately visible effect when toggled in the options menu, to avoid confusion.
This morning, I fixed an issue that has persisted since the original Eldritch, so that multiple concurrent tutorial dialogs will queue instead of stacking on each other. Back in the Eldritch days, I worked around this by identifying all the cases where multiple tutorial pop-ups could collide and explicitly delaying one or more of them by a frame or two; it was pretty gross! Now it’s automatic.
I added a little bit of presentation polish when using portal books, fading in from white and pulling the FOV a bit. I might also do this when using the Teleport power. And I need to add some SFX in both cases. My “needs SFX” backlog is growing, and the experience will improve a lot when I finally tackle that.
Finally, I finished up shopkeeper AI. My initial goal was simply to make them stand idle until they entered combat, and then return to their station; but playtesting revealed some edge cases I’d never noticed in the first Eldritch, like how they’ll forget about the player if the player attacks them instead of stealing something, and then gets away. I updated a bunch of my AI sensors and now any NPC will remember if you attacked them, or if you stole from them, or if they saw you pickpocket another NPC, etc.
I really need to make more art but I’m lazy.