Dungeons of Daggerhelm Snowy Mountains Update news

Hello everyone!

The Snowy Mountains zone has a couple new interesting things added to it, as well as some errors that have been temporarily fixed by removing some things.

We'll start with two new enemies, one located solely in the Snowy Mountains zone: the zombie penguin.

Zombie penguins are a new type of enemy that walks slowly towards the player when within a certain distance. If the player collides with them, the player will take a certain amount of damage for the amount of time they have touched the penguin. If the player walks out of the penguin's line of vision, the zombie penguins will stop chasing the player and resume an idle position.

Zombie penguins can be particularly difficult to deal with if caught in large groups. They have an increased health pool and take more shots to kill. Be careful not to get surrounded!

The next enemy will be available to fight in both the grasslands and the snowy mountains zone: slain hero.

Slain Heroes are the dead spirits of heroes killed in combat in each of the zones, resurrected to fight the heroes still alive. They combine attack methods of both the penguin and slate demons, by walking toward the player to attack them with melee, and shooting fireballs every once in a while if the player tries to outrun them. Getting stuck in a corner by a Slain hero almost guarantees death.

Onto the technical stuff. The game was running great until Game Maker updated to a new patch. Since the patch, we've been getting a specific error while testing the Snowy Mountains zone: "Warning: too many manifolds in collision". The error would occur every step, and would continue until the game slowed down so much that it crashed the game, and Game Maker Pro as well. This bug was frustrating to pin-point, but it has been temporarily mended by changing most of the enemy collision areas to boxes instead of circles.

Switching out the circles meant that there were less manifolds for the in-engine collision system to detect. Square-on-square collisions work better to resolve this issue, but we would like to bring the circular collision hitboxes back to the game once a more stable solution is found.

Pre-alpha demo v0.04: We're looking to release another pre-alpha demo version within the next couple of weeks after we do some tweaking and some more additions to the zones to make them more enjoyable. It will be released as the 0.04 version.

Looking ahead: We will strive to release a demo of the game once every 0.01 versions to the best of our ability, up to our 0.08 build. Then we'll be releasing a final, cleaned up version, v0.09, with most of the bugs fixed and the combat system streamlined, to prepare for Alpha v0.1.

Alpha v0.1 will deal primarily with the streamlining of our armor and item equip system. This will include adding lootable items to the game, item chests, armor equip, larger inventory space, and status effects. We have a simple system in the game right now, but it does not work the way its supposed to, and it is designed to show how the drag and drop system for items will work visually.

Please disregard any errors associated with the inventory, and we do apologize for that broken aspect of the game so far, as well as any others you may encounter. We are working diligently to get the framework of the game set up before we dive into something as diverse and complicated as the inventory system.