Hello everyone. A new update is here.

I've been hard at work cleaning up all the rooms which were still in a bit of a prototype state, and I’ve begun to fill out those room interiors. There’s no time to loose so let’s get right into it.

• Download Arkavite [0.11.0-A]

There have been numerous room design updates.

The garden/courtyard area looks incredibly different. So different I highly doubt anyone realised this is what it was going to be from the initial block out alone. I wanted to create this as a kind of safe zone. A place where you might be able to cook and set camp within the confines of the dungeon. It also has an increased chance of connecting to a pool of restoration.

The generator can now take multiple variants per tile and this is the first of many. What started as a barracks turned into something closer to a quarters / communal area. Still a work in progress. The room feels a bit too open. More work will be done on this.

A couple of you have rightly mentioned that the pool rooms were looking a little bare. I couldn’t agree more and decided to do a bit more work on it. I'll probably fill all those empty cubbies with candles and possibly have some loot spawn inside them. Around the ground I plan to have destructible pots containing coin. There’s more to be done, but even in its current state, it’s looking much better than before.

This whole redesign forced me to adding a new function for the generator. Since the standard door was too big for the new pool room, I've introduced a system which lets me control the general door type for specific rooms (e.g. Big, Medium, Smol, etc.). I could use this to force locked doors, gates between areas, and force special doors to spawn in front of "boss rooms". More commonly, I'll be applying small doors to bedrooms, study’s, and recreational type rooms. The kind of rooms you'd expect to not have giant grandiose doors leading into.

Also on the topic of doors, I've added a wall variant which appears as a boarded up door. This is just for aesthetic more than anything, but it does build the illusion of a dungeon larger than it really is. Leaving the wall of a connection point blank can look pretty boring, hence my move to have them randomly spawn torches, or chests in front of them. More wall variants will come in the future to give dungeons more visual variety.

The prison has been improved. I would say it looks pretty empty right now. I may add more verticality to the room. Cells running up the walls or cages hanging that you can platform over. I found my staircase models were a little too short in some cases. As you can see above, it doesn't quite reach the ground on its own. I had to add a little extra step. I'll hop back into the modelling chambers and figure things out. Some more work to be done here, but it's coming together nicely.
 
A quick note on my long term plans for the prison. Like the TF sewers, this room is meant to eventually act as its own biome. We'll eventually have more prisony type blocks branching off of it so it manifests as s seemingly contiguous prison block. 

There are a few more rooms which have been cleaned up. Spiral staircase, double staircase, the balcony treasure room. I've put the arena to one side for now, and removed it from generation. It will come back once I've cleaned it up and it's ready to house a boss.

One last note on generation. I've tweaked the spawn parameters so that for the current update, some of these newer rooms and designs will be easier to fine. It's not representative of what final generation will be like.

This is the last thing I was working on just before pushing this update out. The status effect display now has a timer and shows the name of the status effect on screen.
 
Also, you might have noticed a new status effect. Slow. This status effect slows you down. I added this to slow down the player when wading through liquids. Being able to sprint through liquids at full speed does look pretty weird.
 
On the backend I have developed the additional status effect Haste, which as the name implies speeds you up. I will be bringing this in as a potion. Maybe in the next update. We will see.

I've added a new handheld item to the game. You can pick it up at the entrance to the dungeon. It’s a torch! When you're holding it, it lights up your surroundings. At the moment it self-ignites. Maybe in the future I'll add more interactive functionality, such as give you the ability to set things on fire. At the very least, I should make it so that torches extinguish when in liquid.

There are no dedicated "torch held" animations at the moment. It currently uses the same animations as a held sword. I am working to fix this.

While we're on the topic of animations, I've made it so that when the player health is reduced to 1 heart they’ll enter a critical health state and hunch over like they're injured. I may add more visual effects and sfx to accompany this in the future.

We love to see fixes. The dialog issue affecting the peen tags has now been resolved. I found this was caused by a flaw in my tag detection code. Tags are composed of 3 parts. Prefix, character id, and suffix. For example "entity.pc.p" is the raw tag for a characters johnson. "entity." is the prefix, "pc" is the character id, and ".p" is the tag suffix. When the system tried to extract the id by searching for the prefix and suffix, the ".p" component of ".pc" was mistakenly identified as the suffix which in turn caused the whole tag to be thrown out, and for me to realize my code was terribly flawed.

Long story short, yesterday I ripped out all the tag detection code and replaced it with a simple regex. Way more reliable, a few hundred lines shorter and easier to debug. It should have been regex from the get go, but hey, c'est la vie.

In other fix news, I've unbroken the auto close on sandbox doors. That being said, I may change those to physics based doors, as I like the feel of them, and contrary to appearances, the player does not have telekinesis, yet. Finally I've rebuilt the broken lighting for the character creator main scene.

And that brings us to the end of the mini log, which ended up being not so mini. I intended for this to be a quick overview, but this has turned into quite the log.

I have a number of more room variants lined up. Both for regular rooms and obstacles. I'll also be making some updates to the existing TF obstacle rooms. I do want to address the issue of repetition soon with a parameter which will restrict the maximum number of allowed instances of a given room per level. I couldn't do it this week as it turned out to be more of a design banaza then variant development, but next week I'm going all in on room variants.

Not this week, but maybe next week once the new variants are in, I'll need to go on another optimisation tirade. This time focused on material bloat and size reduction (optimisations, not the fetish).
 
Please be sure to let me know what you think! We're on a roll right now. I'll do my best to keep it up. I'll be coming out with a meta post early to mid-week on the topic of update cadence, and goals. Next build next weekend. I'm shooting for saturday.
 
Until then~