Greetings everybody I hope this April finds you well, aside from My little computer snafu, things are good so let me show you all what I've been working on this month.

For those who don't want too many spoilers

• Finished all the remaining card art
• put cards into the inventory system and battle/deck system
• fixed a controller support bug that prevented the player from being able to run
• wrote descriptions for all the cards that can appear in the card shop and inventory
• made dynamic tightropes
• re-tiled old levels with the new tileset
• made card shop GUI, card ship interior artwork
• finished card shop shelf spacing code
• finished card shop card inventory management code
• various concept art drawings and ponderous thinking happened too

Demo Update 1.04

I have added the new code to the demo that fixes the bug that stopped the left shoulder button from registering as held or pressed when a Bluetooth controller was detected as a direct input device instead of an XInput device.

For ya' all who want to see the juicy stuff...

 Warning: the following contains spoilers!

I believe in the h-ART of the cards

I finally got the artwork done for every card that will be in the game there are bunches of them and even if they're in the same set they still had to have a different background than the others that they share art with so it took quite a few weeks of off and on pixel-starting to get them all done!

The card shop

I've always wanted the game to have a very extensive card shop that you'll return to as you progress the story, take a gander at it. I'm personally quite happy with it.

Look at all those cards! that's not even all of them, there are another 12 found in the world and each card above has an alpha, beta, and omega card that can be bought in that order. 

Coding this shop in particular proved to be challenging in its own way. The inventory system is written to show the available cards based on what cards have been bought previously and considers what stage of the story you're at.  As the story progresses the inventory of cards will grow. 

All this meant that I had a lot of extra work to do, every card had to be hooked into the battle and inventory system, and I'm still not done.

Cutting room floor

Do you want to solve another maze?  No?  Good, because I didn't want to make another one of these things. 

I'm not entirely sure what drives a game designer to put more than one maze section in a game.  *Padding the play time* cough cough, sorry, got something stuck in my throat. This maze was going to be something that you'd interact with repeatedly as a means of travel to and from different departments in the office hell dream. You would have to spin and replace parts of the tubes to make a path to every department and it all seemed like a lot of work for something that was stopping you from exploring the level. 

So I asked myself if this was fun and I concluded that it would be anything but.  A good rule of thumb in game design is If you can improve the game by not doing something, that's good. That's design by subtraction, games are defined by what you decide to omit just as much as what you decide to include. In the end, I replaced this maze with a train that takes you from department to department.  

The train's animation looks pretty good too, so it's convenient and easy on the eyes.

Don't worry too much about the fate of the tubes.

They look great in the level as set dressing/world-building. 

That's all for now. I'll be back again soon with another update!