Pit Raiders Devlog: Tile Troubles (Patreon)

General Announcements:
Hey all! It's been a lil bit, sorry for not doing updates as often as before!  The truth is that I've been at the drawing board a lot. Trying to figure out what works and what doesn't!
I'm going to keep aiming for a release in mid December, with the goal of adding a lot more combat and enemies, as well as a new game mode and some story to follow.

What I've done:
A big thing I shelved early on was a procedural map. It's really hard to make a map interesting while being procedural, but there's been a lot of progress on that front! I've reimplemented the handler and basically rewrote it all.

I'm calling the tile generator ISOTILEv2, and it's basically just an object that can spawn, manage, and update a map of up to a few thousand tiles. In the current state it has a few key features:

• Tiles are independent and can be edited after being set, they can also run small functions inside of them.
• Designed a few shaders that can wrap and warp textures. This creates windy effects and also lets me have more control over all the tiles on the map at once. It also cuts down a lot on memory since the shader can infinitely repeat and vary textures for cheap.
• Tiles can be turned into colliders, which can make them into pits or walls. This took a surprisingly long time to set up, especially since it needed to be implemented in a way that didn't let players escape the map at the edges!

My vision for this system is that players will descend in a run and sometimes get a procedural map, other times get a map that I design by hand. This will offer some benefits in variety, customizability, and most importantly memory and development resources. The procedural maps will have enemies, puzzles, several fun things to try! Working out kinks in the system will be tricky but this will also narrow the scope of the project and let me focus on the actual content.

Notable Changes:
-Enemies run a bit more efficiently and damage is more reliable. (updated combat handler)
-Jone can now run isometrically, the speed is the same but this helps keep the colliders more manageable.
-Dash can jump over small gaps
-ISOTILEv2 has been implemented, still a work in progress but it'll probably be put out for bug testing before release.
-Materials have been reworked, this fixes a major issue on the beach level where the water shader didn't obey the rules of displayable images. (backpack button not appearing bug is fixed)
-Working on accessory system
-Added status effect displayer, it's pretty you folks will like it.