Hotfix #1

Gonna try to keep this fairly short, just trying to get in the habit of making these in general XD

This is Cannochi from the team just sharing some thoughts on the recent release, the hotfixes, and the project as a whole in no particular order.

Here's a link to the game incase you want to try it out!

https://ember-explorers.itch.io/power-fist

 Feedback is super appreciated! 

Joemog and I did Lame Jam 43 a couple weeks back, and had so much fun with our game, we decided to keep working on it. Our most recent build pushed out yesterday was the result of about two weeks of lots of work trying to flesh out the core mechanics of punching things, levelling up, progressing and customizing your playstyle.

We already pivoted from a permadeath survivorslike style of game to more of a persistent RPG, possibly ARPG style of game. 

We really wanted to lean into a goofy and cartoony aesthetic mixing a medieval setting with retro 80s colors and characters inspired by the movie Kung Fury.

For the main release yesterday, our main focus was on building up the village by saving various people scattered around the world. That guided our enemies we made, as well as the biomes and other mechanics we setup. Overall I think it was a really cool way to propagate out other content from a core idea. 

One of our friends Oscar also made all of the amazing music we have in the game! It has been really awesome working with him as well! Here's his youtube channel if you want to check out some of his other awesome music! 

https://www.youtube.com/@domainsofambience5612

As for the hotfixing, myself, Joemog, Oscar, and many more of our amazing friends helped find various bugs, pain points, etc. and we wanted to address as many as we could in this update.  It is so great to get feedback, and iterate on it to help guide the process. While it is surely fun to make a game that Joemog and I like to play, it is even more fun to make one that more people might enjoy as well! Some things we included in this hotfix (and this is by no means exhaustive):

-added additional visual feedback when player taking damage

-added additional visual feedback when player levels up

-10 million bugfixes

-Tuned some abilities that were undertuned

Still a lot to learn regarding performance and optimization! As you start instantiating hundreds and thousands of game objects like the lightning bolt and death procs, the game definitely starts to stutter a bit XD. I've messed a bit with object pooling in a previous project, and so that might be the approach we take here. Part of the challenge though is that as far as I know, object pooling is generally used when you have a static number of things. Or at least that's how I've used it in the past. I'm going to look more into having a more dynamic object pool where some is loaded in in the beginning, and more is added in as time goes by and the player needs it. The hope is that then we can have even more fun and ambitious abilities without taking too big of a performance hit. Having it run on web is definitely a constraint in that regard, but so far I've been pleasantly surprised by how far we can push it performance wise. And having it available on web is really cool in my opinion as the barrier to entry for new players trying it out is extremely low.

Anyways if you are reading this and have any suggestions for making web games more performant I am all ears! Especially when you are potentially instantiating hundreds or thousands or even tens of thousands of game objects per second, looking forward into the future, that is something we will want to address in some fashion.

Also, if you have any suggestions on platforms to publish webgames on other than itch, let us know! As far as I can tell itch is cool for posting dev and test builds, but unless you get super lucky is not great for random players stumbling across and discovering your game. I might be totally wrong in that regard, just the impression I've gotten.

Let us know if you have any other feedback in the comments here, the comments in the game, or stop on by the community discord we just made: https://discord.gg/xBG4uP7u

Anyways that's all for now folks!