Major Update 1 - v0.23

Hey guys! I'm excited to announce some major changes to the project! First of all, you may have noticed that the title has changed. The game is now titled The Only Evil, which comes from a quote in John Milton's Paradise Lost: "Neither man nor angel can discern hypocrisy, the only evil that walks invisible".

Other than just a name change, there have been some other big updates recently. Most noticeable right off the bat is a new main menu and that the tutorial has been completely removed and replaced with the above quote from Milton. I felt that it was unnecessary to treat the player like they had never used WASD to move a character before. This creates a much more surreal introduction to the game and adds tons to the overall atmosphere IMO. I did however expand the tutorial in the second level that teachers players how to Dash. I felt this mechanic needed some explanation as it may not be too intuitive. Here's a screenshot of the new tutorial:

I also felt that the Apple should play a larger role in the story, so it will be whispering in the player's ear from now on.

Another huge feature coming with this version is the ability to save and load progress! You may have seen the "Continue" button on the main menu; that's not just for show! At the beginning of each level, the game saves the players progress, which can be loaded later from the main menu. I'm not sure if these saves will work between versions, but I would encourage people to restart after each major update because the beginning of the game will be changing significantly over the next few weeks.

On the subject of switching levels, I've programmed a whole new system for level changes which should scale better as more and more levels are added. There's also now a cool portal (yay Unity particle effects!) at the end of each level to tell the player where to go.

Of course, as with all of my major updates, I've also introduced some cheeky bugs. If the player makes it to level three without dying and dies to one of the little angel fellows, sometimes nothing will happen and the player won't be able to die or respawn. I think I've found a fix for this- it turned out that I was using OnCollisionEnter2D() (for those of you familiar with Unity) to detect if the player had been hit by and enemy and also by that particular enemy to tell it to stop moving when it hits the player. If the one that stops the enemy is called before the one that kills the player, sometimes the player would start dying but not finish and therefore get stuck. If this comes up while you play, just refresh the page and take advantage of the new save system! It will be fixed in the next version.

Another bug that sometimes comes up is that the player doesn't do the dash after pressing the dash button the first time. Not sure why this is, but I'm investigating it now.

I tested out the new save system by  building a new level:

I like the style of this level a lot, there's a mixture of thinner connection platforms and the more groundlike platforms. Levels in the future will feature this kind of combination heavily.

Holy von Pony is still on the way. I wanted to get a new level loading system in place because she's going to have her own levels and I didn't want to add a bunch of new scenes before implementing it fully. The next update should probably include her (unless it's just bugfixes). Overall, I'm super excited about this update because I feel that the game is getting to the stage where I have a good enough base to start really expanding content. Thanks for reading and let me know if you have any feedback, I love hearing from you guys!