I was really tempting fate by saying "Released on the 21st, providing there's no major issues". Guess what there's been...

I got through all the outstanding bugs and got to a completed stage. The game got compiled and packaged, which took almost a day together. Unusually, there were no issues there. Usually I hit something that needs fixed before it will compile, but not this time.

So, playtesting started. Noted a few minor bugfixes until I hit the worldmap, and you can't move from the first map node. That's a gamekiller right off the bat. It's taken almost 3 days to work through and figure out whats happening, and it all came down to a simple true/false.

When the worldmap is generated, each node has a name. The first one is StartNode and end is EndNode, with sequential names between. Each node has a true/false check to see if the level has been completed. If it is incomplete, the level start. If it is True/Complete, it lets you move. For some reason when the world generates, it wasn't setting the start as complete to allow that initial movement.

This took so long to track down because it works in the editor.

I went through testing it part by part, reassigning movement keys, the works until I finally tracked the problem down. This was compounded by not being able to test the issue without packaging the game each time... That's then brought it to the second gamekiller. The main Forest level doesn't open.

I'm not sure why, but there seems to be some differences between in-editor and packaged. For example, I tested through the game a bunch of times in the editor, but as soon as it got packaged, you get things like some map nodes dropping you through the floor, game overs needing you to create character twice because the first time they're already dead, unconcious enemies howling at you, and so on.

The biggest problem though is the size of the game. The first build hit 1.5Gb, and through removing every asset not in use in the game, I have managed to take that down to 1.45Gb. The limit for Itch is 1Gb, and this is still phase 1 of 4, so there's a lot of work being done on reducing the size of it, but I'm not sure what else I can remove without taking content out.

So, things have been delayed. I apologise to everyone, but at this point it's not going to hit the 21st as I wanted. I'm flat out on getting this thing functional and of a good filesize. It will be done as soon as it's done, which is a really shitty phrase, but even as a completely pessimistic person, I didn't see some of these issues coming.