Hey, it's been a few weeks since SAGE 2024!

Overall, I'm quite happy with how Dungeon Gals performed. I got an unexpectedly large amount of downloads, and it seems that while DG didn't get very much discussion, those who did voice their opinions about the game absolutely loved it. I've gotten a lot of messages, both personal and forwarded, about how much players adored the demo, the little details, and everything else.

One of the most numerous pieces of feedback I got was requests for rebindable controls. I was expecting this, and honestly kind of dreading it. DG's input handling was honestly pretty jank, and having it be rebindable required a complete rewrite of how the game handled player inputs.

So, uh, that's what happened. x_x

A massive amount of credit has to be given to my co-programmer, Mog. Without their help, none of this would have happened - the technical aspects of this fly so far over my head it's unbelievable. I'm a composer and artist by trade, not programmer. There's even going to be an option for selecting which icons you want for your buttons, depending on which brand of controller you're playing with. There will also be button prompts for actions you can take, rather than speech bubbles with symbols. Hopefully this makes things a bit clearer!

There were also some really odd bugs that people found in the demo. Some of these were pretty banal, but there was one that was, just, absolutely buck wild. So wild, in fact, I made an update just to fix it. If you died against the boss of the demo, you would be ejected back into the hub, as normal -  along with the boss itself. I had no idea how this happened, and I never figured it out. I'm pretty certain this is a bug with GameMaker itself, so I had to brute force a solution. It was extremely funny, and part of me wishes I kept it in because of how silly it was. 

I took a break from development for a bit, but I'm hoping to go back to full steam ahead soon. I'll try to get an updated demo out sometime soon, with more bugfixes and such.

Another thing I've been noticing is how difficult it's been to get myself to work at times. Pretty much all the fun aspects of development (level design, mainly) have concluded, which leaves me with fixing technical issues, cutscenes, menus, etc. This is stuff that I find pretty difficult to do, so it's been rough. But things have been a lot easier since my co-programmer has become more involved with the work! So hopefully things should speed up. I just wish I had more levels to design, but I don't want to balloon this game's scope anymore than it already has been.

Thank you all for the continued support! It's been a wild ride, and I hope to get this damn thing done as soon as I can while making sure it still rules.