Devlog - Alpha 8

The focus of this update was various polish & performance improvements.

Release Notes:

• Lingering Bodies
  • Units drop dead for a few seconds before being taken under the ground to be despawned
  • The initial plan for this was to have a physics body spawn and play out in a separate physics world. That's doable, but not important for beta and if I ever get around to implementing a sophisticated death system I can revisit this solution.
• Eye improvements
  
  • Eyes have been changed to a single animated quad mesh rather than 3-4 separate box meshes
  • Eyes also only render within a certain radius
  • These changes should reduce the performance impact a bit (every little bit counts at this stage) without making them noticeably worse
  • (*note, I'll likely make them unlit eventually so they're more visible in dark/shadow)
• Un-Attack
  • Attack animations are now split into wind-up and attack. The wind up animation is cancelable into a new "unattack" stage that lets units who are winding up an attack on a target that no longer exists reconsider whether they want to follow through.
    • Just a polish change mostly, less (though notably not 'no') fireballs going off after combat has ended 

Known Bugs:

• Web version is a bit jank still
• Lag spikes probably still exist, let me know if/when/where you run into these
• Thumbnail is a bit borked still, didn't want to get stuck on it, but I'll keep hacking away and maybe find the solution soon
• The lighting is a ugly in lower light. This is mainly due to relying on post processing brightness/contrast adjustments, I'll probably take another pass looking at this before Beta

Next up:

Next update will be focused on giving some more personality to the Wizard and Merchant. No more un-existing them, have to explain what happens