A cliff that holds you, and a world in order

What happened today

This evening was about the things you barely notice when they work and notice immediately when they don't. First, the cliff north of the ship: while testing, Marko kept hopping down sideways at the right-hand corner, even though only one spot is meant for jumping. Now your hero stays on top at the outer corner. If you want to go down, you take the spot made for it. It sounds small, but it decides whether a height feels like a real slope or like a picture with holes in it.

Then we kept working on the backpack. With the mouse everything now behaves the way you'd expect: clicking the helmet no longer makes anything vanish, a right click takes a piece off or puts it back on, and you can take everything off and put it all back without losing a thing. On the controller Marko had found something stubborn: after taking armor off, you had to press A four to six times before it went back on. Now one press is enough. And the fiber cape we use to test equipment finally lands in the backpack when the test gear is handed out.

What we got done

Your saves get a permanent home. We changed the save format. A save no longer remembers an area by a file path but by a fixed name. That lets us reorganize areas later without your progress pointing at nothing. There's also an automatic backup of the old save, so nothing gets lost in the switch. You won't see any of it from the outside, but it's the foundation for your adventure to keep running while the world grows behind the scenes.

The world gets tidy. The bigger Veyl gets, the more individual areas there are. In our world-building tool we now sort them into folders and subfolders, roughly like planet, chapter and station. Folders can be expanded and collapsed, searched, created and moved with a click, and everything that points to them moves along.

The library becomes a reference book. That's where all the pieces we build the world from live. We can now filter by black and white, and one button brings all colors back. Search no longer looks in a single tab but in all of them at once, and it also shows which style a piece comes from. Cards that move carry a small play symbol, so you can see at a glance which rocks breathe and which portals spin, and which stay still.

Painting heights the way you'd want. The height levels that plateaus and cliff walls grow from got their own brush. It paints without gaps, the preview shows exactly the later result, and the bracket keys make it bigger and smaller. The eraser removes only the height and leaves the ground underneath alone.

What we're working on

In some places the hero still walks under a fallen branch when he should be standing in front of it. That's next, along with the red lava, which should look less brown. We're also working on automatic saving, so you never lose more than a few minutes.

What's next

First the starting area has to get really good, and the first areas are moving into their new folders for that. After that we'll tell you how it feels to walk through it yourself.

See you tomorrow,