Beta Build v0.8.5x3 - Companion!

FINALLY here! So sorry this one took so long - I'd originally been hoping on getting it out before the holidays, but that was a bit of an ambitious goal, and I severely underestimated the time I'd take getting new sound effects into the game (what I thought would take 2 or 3 days ended up taking over 2 weeks). The two major additions this build are new sets of jumping/landing animations to help give the player more weight to their movement when lugging around prey, and of course the new voracious companion, Mel!

Jumping now has a brief windup if you're carrying any prey that gets longer the more prey you have, and when landing on the ground, particularly if you're falling from a great height, there will be a brief animation when you land as well, plus lots of new sloshy sounds! Took a minute to get the animations looking right, but now that they're in I think they do a lot to add to the game feel. Also acts as another minor consequence for being a glutton - carrying all that weight around shouldn't be TOO easy! Of course, I'll see about adding upgrades to the Gene Editor in the future so these things can be mitigated.

The companion was the real reason this update took so much extra time though - while the extremely talented Volt Jolt has been able to handle the animations, it was still a brand new entity that had to be built from the ground up, and I also had to include all sorts of considerations for how it would need to react to actions of both the player and enemies. By itself, the companion added an additional 3,900-ish lines of code, not counting all the extra lines of code I had to add to the player and enemies alike for how they would interact with the companion (of which I'd wager there's probably at least another 2,000). Additionally, I needed more vore sound effects - the library I had on hand really wasn't super big, and I didn't want to constantly reuse the same sounds. It ended up being a solid 2.5 weeks of work, but there are now over 400 new sound effects (which you can see a number of featured in the gif below, which was taken before I went and added another hundred or so), both collected from resources online along with a few I created with some help. You'll notice the game file size has doubled from that alone! A significant portion of them were also edited by me in Audacity, both for the sake of creating brand new sfx by mashing existing ones together and applying filters, as well as just generally cleaning up the audio quality of others where I could and balancing the audio. Obviously all 400+ of those sounds are not yet in use, but I DID use almost exclusively new sound effects for the companion, and with all the sound effects I now have, I'll be pretty well set for a good while when making new vore animations. I've also been going back and adding alternate sounds to existing animations where I can so they don't always play the same sound. There are a TON of new burp sfx too, though besides with the companion, I haven't yet added many of them - been too focused on finishing out the companion themselves, but I'll be sure to give Mia even more burp sounds soon here. Currently the companion only has the one form, but the plan is for there to be 4 in total - I actually already have the sprites for the next two, which I'll start working on adding immediately, but I also plan to have them largely be using sound effects that are unique from each other and don't overlap much, so each companion form will feel even more unique.

The companion code took a good while to complete, but now that it's in, I'm very pleased with how it came out - it's definitely some of the cleanest code I've written to date, and it so far seems to function extremely well. The companion will generally fly to hang out near Mia, usually a little behind and above her, but when Mia isn't moving much she'll move around a little and cycle through a few sets of different idling animations. She normally takes direct paths to Mia, but is programmed to avoid walls if at all possible, and does a pretty good job staying out of them 99% of the time. I had to allow some edge cases where she will pass through walls due to the player being faster than her and it being possible to cut her off significantly enough that she can't easily find a way around to get to Mia, and in these edge cases she'll briefly pass through walls to reach her destination.

The companion is also edible - she has 20 health, which can be turned into health for Mia by digesting her. Don't worry - the companion is immortal, and digesting her will result in her reverting to her orb form and being regurgitated. She slowly regenerates health, so after a moment she'll take form again and resume following Mia.

Her main benefit is how she helps deal with enemies - When Mia is being pursued by an enemy, the companion will fly in front of the enemy and shove them, trying to slow them down and hold them back from reaching Mia. They're decently effective at this, but if she keeps it up for too long, enemies will get annoyed and attack the companion - she'll go down pretty quick if you're not careful.

Besides that, she will also help Mia chase down the minimech pilots! I have plans in the future to give these tiny pilots some additional behaviors (things like running to alert nearby enemies, swarming the player to slow their movement, and summoning new mechs) so the companion will be even more useful helping deal with these nuisances. Any pilots the companion eats will add to the heath she restores if Mia eats her too - think of her as a helpful little health pack on the go!

There's a settings menu that's been added to the pause menu for the companion as well - currently it includes a toggle for allowing the player to eat them and two other toggles relating to their sound effects (in case you find their constant digestion sounds annoying or don't want to hear them sloshing when they're moving around while full). If you have other suggestions for toggles I could add to this menu, do let me know!

I have further plans for the companions in the future - I'm thinking of possibly giving them their own little upgrade machine like the Gene editor to give them some extra features and abilities. I'm also planning on making the other forms the companion can take have some different benefits - we'll have to see how it pans out.

The companion exists in their floating orb form normally - find and touch that orb to befriend her! She's currently hidden in level 1 (and I'll make a more official place to find her as soon as I get working on building more level content). She's also available in the beta room right beside where Mia spawns.

The wait for the next build will not be nearly as long now that I'm not doing anything on a scale like this one was next - I WOULD still like to try and have a new build out monthly or at least every other month, so we'll see what all I'm able to squeeze into each one. Most immediately I plan to add the next two companions since I already have the animations for those as well as a nice new library of sound effects to use, then I have a couple pages of bug reports to get through that I haven't had time to address since I've been so focused on finishing the companion to get it to you all as soon as possible. After that, I'm very likely to start looking at building out some necessary features for the actual story of the game - dialogue boxes, some new menus and interactables, probably an inventory system with a few various items, and such like that. The blind drake rework into a proper mini boss will also be coming up - we'll see how soon that gets in!

There might be a couple other things I see about adding besides all that, but otherwise, we'll be looking at launching a kickstarter fairly soon - if that's able to succeed, I'll be able to properly hire several more animators and artists and put myself fully into coding, and then this game should REALLY start adding some flesh to its bones. Sorry its seemed like pretty slow going so far over the years - I've been very focused on trying to iron out the foundation of this game before getting into kickstarter to make sure I have a solid base to build off of, especially with how interdependent so many features are on each other and the foundation. The good news is I'm very happy so far with the foundation that's been laid, and I truly feel like it's about ready to start building up everything else. I don't feel like this project is likely to hit any major roadbumps in development since I've gotten a lot of the most technical and complex stuff out of the way, like how the platforming handles, how the vore system works, some other core features like the companion themselves and how the whole stealth system works and how enemies function, pathfind, and generally behave.

Be sure to report any bugs you find, as always!

Cheers to you all for sticking with me through this and continuing to support the development of this weird game - it's a ton of work, and while I'm tired a lot, I'm far from burnt out - I'm actually quite excited for the direction things are headed! :D