Not to make an extravagant claim or anything, but I think I might have just solved all the game's speed problems in one go. (Not that anyone else was reporting any, that is. It seems that only I have a computer too poor to run my own game.)



I had a look at that after noticing that a level that I'd sat on without quite completing for ages slowed down drastically after I scattered collectible gems throughout. Disabling their collisions when they're not near the game window doesn't have an impact on gameplay because you're always on the screen when you hit one, but it's made performance leap from a snail's pace on some of the more complex levels back to completely normal and fast again. It's just slightly annoying that I discovered this only after a whole lot of other performance-related effort.

Work on the game has sped up again after I released a half-finished version to some testers selected for their interest, game design knowledge or lack of more important things to do, and I'm once again feeling that it's actually going to be quite good - they've been keeping me busy with suggestions for improvements in all areas. I'm quite pleased, also, that the game seems to be taking about as long to play as it did to create.

Probably the biggest new feature suggested by the testers is on the pause menu - rakarr mentioned it would be nice to have a quicker method of selecting spells, and together we brainstormed the idea of spell shortcuts up. It works in much the same way as RTS group shortcuts - highlight an ability and hit a number key to be able to instantly select it with that key in the game, avoiding a lot of pausing and unpausing.

I've been doing a bit of work on the graphics myself, and after admitting to myself that not everything had to be done pixel by pixel and I could use Paint.NET to cheat a bit, some of the results have been rather nice - or at least, not recognizable as my usual paltry efforts. I might have modified my own save file a bit on this screenshot.

kjorteo's insistence on me going back and actually making magic less totally useless on early enemies has allowed me to throw in some new effects while I was at it. (Instead of just disappearing along with it as before, the spiny thing at the bottom left flies out of the screen towards you when the monster that it belonged to is destroyed... this makes a lot more sense in motion.)

I love how this looks! After being a little grey box for so long, I just let myself go mad with it. This is going to be roughly central to the hub level, and allows you to combine reward items you've got from enemies into items that give you new abilities. (The wonderful appropriateness of having a synthesizer as the centre of the Music Castle was something that happened entirely accidentally.)

The control customization menu makes about fifty times more sense than it did before.

Getting a good level by saving a bad one from oblivion is a wonderful feeling. After having a couple of them lying around unloved for ages, it's surprising what a bit of graphical effort can do. This one still needs a bit of work done to it (on that blob creature, specifically), but it's already looking much better than the shabby state it was in when I last released this to testers.

And this is another (slightly plain) screenshot of another new level. This one introduces vines that you can cling on to - usefully for me, this whole mechanic is an optical illusion applied to an existing one, because they're just invisible platforms, with visible vines overhead, that the player has a different animation on when he's walking across. And the added ability to drop down from them as well as jump up.