Jumping and items in hand

What has happened so far

The day is not over yet, but a lot has already come together, so we wanted to give you a progress report. Today was mostly about making Veyl feel better to play: the hero jumps, carries his things where they belong at last, and the creatures around him have received proper names.

What pleases us most is free jumping. The hero now jumps freely anywhere, with a key of its own, or A on the controller. Spots we have marked as jumpable can be crossed this way, blocked ones never. Marko tried it with the controller and said it works great and is fun. Dodging got a key of its own so that the two do not get in each other's way.

What we got done

• Items in the hand: Walking sticks, tools, weapons, small things and the torch now really sit in the hero's hand, seen from all four directions. Before, the stick used to hang at his leg, which looked rather odd while running.
• A new tool bar: In our Terra Engine, which we use to build the areas, the bar now has buttons of equal size with clear symbols instead of a mix of text and little pictures. It looks calmer and is much quicker to read.
• Every creature with its own name: Thirteen names used to appear more than once, spread across 29 creatures. 28 of them now have a name of their own, and only the Crystal Spider keeps its name because it had already been approved. Among the animals no name appears twice anymore either, and the earthly animal names from the early days have been replaced with names made for Veyl.
• The library has a new structure: Creatures and inhabitants are kept apart, and the animals sit in folders by kind, for example all snakes together. That helps us while building and later with the wiki, because every animal has a name of its own.
• Cozy: The easiest difficulty level is now called Cozy everywhere, in German and in English. The rules behind it have not changed.

What we are working on

We have also just built in holding the jump key longer, and we are trying it out right now: a short tap stays the jump you know, and if you hold the key the hero jumps smoothly up to one tile farther. On top of that we are building the first rock step with a staircase at the crash site. It has not been approved yet, so we will only show it to you once it really looks good.

The full daily report follows later. Thank you for following along.

See you tomorrow,