Version 0.1.0.0 of Tower of Drakoria is officially released!

After quite some time, multiple crashes, and a handful of project corruptions leading to bugs later, the first public release of Tower of Drakoria is now out. I just want to take this devlog to talk about some overall and balancing changes from the prototype and playtest versions alongside any currently known issues, any exclusions or delays, the thought process behind some decisions, and things for the potential future.

OVERALL LOOK AT CHANGES AND UPDATES:

• Player's Basic Attack damage has been increased
• Amount of EXP gained from picking up EXP Gems has been slightly altered
  • Both these above changes will hopefully make the beginning of the game slightly easier, allowing players to obtain their first ability and successive abilities somewhat quicker
• Enemy Spawning has been altered, changing the amount of enemies spawned, the rate they are spawned, and when certain enemies appear
• Art and Animation Added to:
  • Player Character
  • All Enemy Characters
  • All Abilities with a Visual Cue
• Audio Added for both SFXs and BGMs.
• Added and Expanded more Narrative and Story, providing further lore and a look into the world of Drakoria
• Setting Implemented and Expanded
  • Fullscreen Mode now toggleable.
  • Resolution in Windowed Mode can be changed.
  • Audio for BGM and SFX can be changed via sliders
• Removed the 6 ability limit, allowing players to choose and select as many abilities as they want. Upgrading abilities is still possible.
  • I wanted to experiment with allowing the player to choose if they want to have more abilities, wanting to see how having zero limit would impact the difficulty of the game considering the 20 minute per level timer. As a test, there is a chance this change doesn't stay, as it ultimately depends on player feedback and opinions on how the game ends up feeling.
• Removed the implementation of SFX for the picking up of EXP Gems
  • Because of the BGM playing during gameplay, the SFX for hovering over and clicking a button, the SFX for getting hurt, the SFX for damaging enemies, the SFX for eliminating enemies, the SFX for winning and losing, and so on, I decided against adding an SFX for picking up EXP gems. Due to the amount of sound already present in the game alongside the amount of EXP Gems you pick up and the rate at which you do so, I felt like adding an SFX for picking up EXP gems would be a tad too much.
• Various Bug Fixes and Adjustments
  • Includes but is not limited to: changes for abilities, The Akashic Records ability made into a Rare Ability, various rebalancing for the chance of seeing each ability, and more.

CURRENT KNOWN ISSUES:

• Audio has a chance of breaking.
  • Returning to the Main Menu after entering Gameplay for the first time via the Pause Menu, Defeat Screen, or Floor Cleared Screen can mess up the audio, causing the audio in the Gameplay Scene to carry over into the Main Menu and Opening Cutscene, wiping their audio.  There is also a chance that the BGM and Button SFX for the main menu and the BGM for the Gameplay disappear in further restarting the game via one of the "Restart Game" options mentioned above
• Audio for the Player's footsteps only activate once when pressing the movement key.
• The Player's character sprite appears small on screen until the player starts moving.
• The ability "Beam of the Majin's" art sprite is not appearing properly during gameplay despite it appearing fine during development and in it's prefab.

EXCLUSIONS/DELAYS:

Due to having a busy schedule with other time-consuming projects and finals in my other courses, paired alongside other parts of the development taking up time, I had to cute or delay these features:

• Skill Icons were not included. I originally wanted to have these included, however I was not able to find fitting icons online to use that fit the ability and the art style of the game. If there were some that I could find, they did not have icons that work for all the abilities and I did not want to mix and match different styles. I ultimately decided on making them from scratch, but my inexperience working with pixel art meant that these were more time consuming than originally expected. As such, I decided to not implement these for this version.
• Second Floor was not added. Due to having to find or make new art assets for the map, enemies, and more so that the level isn't the exact same as the first one, I decided to not add a second floor in this update. While I experimented with recolouring the sprites I had for the first floor, the product didn't look that good, so I excluded that as well.
  • Because of this, the game's story narrative couldn't progress onwards to the next floor, so my development plans for implementing a dialogue box to progress the story has not been added just yet.
• The decor for the map (trees, grass, etc.) was not added to the final tilemap due to transparency issues. Leaving them in would leave lots of black around the map rather than the green grass, so that has not been implemented yet.

All these features are still planned and could potentially be released in a potential future update to Tower of Drakoria.

That's about it! There currently isn't an ETA for the next update, so keep your eyes peeled for any new update release. Drakoria awaits. Have fun in the Tower, everyone!