It’s an overdue category, really, since there have been a couple of things I could well have blogged about in the past that’d fit it like a glove.

Recently, we’ve added several levels to the latter half of the seaside environment; these go right before the town. (Cred goes to a friend of ours by the nick “shadowmaster” for doing some of the heavy-lifting there.) These flesh out the area to be decently interesting to play in, and have a number of puzzles and secret areas in them, unlike the prior levels which are significantly (and deliberately) simpler.

Right before the town, we’ve also added a shop, with items you can purchase; the list of purchasable items is not considered final, because although they’re neat ideas, some of them might be destructive to puzzles and such. If so, they’ll be replaced.

We’re also hard at work putting together the town; we’ve already got a small “miniboss” fight working, where you square off against some of the henchmen of Milgram (known as the “Milgramen”), who (as you’d know if you’ve played our previous releases) has taken the town hostage. These soldiers are guarding the gate to the town, and ambush you as you try to talk your way in.

The town itself is also being worked on; the whole environment will be very different from the relatively free-exploring, fight-with-random monsters levels that led up to it; it’ll have doors to unlock, and puzzles involving the rescue of various townspeople (a term which is understandably used quite loosely). At the end of the town, you’ll be treated to the very first boss fight of the game. 😀

For many months now, the Windows builds have either crashed at random places, or crashed consistently in a particular spot. Yesterday I finally tried out MSVC++’s debugger, and squashed 2 buffer overrun bugs (which consistently crashed the game for me, but no one else). And today I helped Dave fix the bug that had been consistently crashing it for everyone (on Windows). It was another buffer overrun bug – some animations had invalid rectangles defined for their frames. Dave fixed it so it will now fail for everyone when that happens, and give an actual error message about it, saying what’s wrong.

All these errors were undetectable on Mac/Linux, but they were real bugs that were causing undefined behavior. I don’t really like using MSVC++ (I’m used to gcc and XCode), but this does show the value of compiling on many platforms.

Technical stuff aside: we finally have a Windows build that doesn’t crash on the 2nd outside level or the editor! Yay!

We’ve added an alpha-version of a world map to frogatto. Like in many classic games, you’ll be able to use this to also teleport yourself to the listed locations on the map. The graphics in this are really an alpha ‘sketch’ of what the final version will look like, but the programmed motion of the camera feels quite nice already.  Here’s a video of it thus far, on youtube:

We’ve updated the forest tree trunks to look considerably more organic, and to have more tiling possibilities for branches. As a result, we’re now starting to work on actual forest levels.