Update 535Just steam-rolling through the list of little things for this next update. It's gonna be pretty substantial, apart from new game modes there's actually a bit of content sneaking in as well, but I don't know how much I want to give away!
Several little weird uninteresting problems show up as a side effect of splitting the game into two modes that you can switch between ~ for example I had the Threat Music from single player unexpectedly show up in multiplayer, etc etc etc.
In the game I actually call it "arena mode" right now rather than multiplayer, because it's possible to play by yourself as well and just brawl against critters. Don't know for sure where the name is going to end up, but I think "Arena" might be good - I would call it "Sandbox" but that's gonna be the name of a specific Arena mode, so it gets a little complicated!
(lame multiplayer footage of me running around alone - but yeah, you get the idea, slugcats and everything else thrashing around like mad in a little room. And yeah, I think that centipede killed a vulture
)
Also, what might be very good news from a technical standpoint! Previously I had loaded all the sounds of the game on startup (a clunky setup, but we had to do it that way so James could feed it external sound files) and that soaked up a loooot of RAM. So I decided to try to load the sounds through Unity instead ~ and that actually worked. So now the game is lazy-loading the sounds, and RAM is doing much better. But the REAL good news is that this enabled me to call the elusive Resources.UnloadUnusedAssets(); method, which just drops everything in RAM that's not being used. I couldn't do that before because Unity didn't recognize all of my hack-loaded sounds and ditched them, but now after a few tweaks it worked out, and *that* truly worked wonders for the RAM issue, it seems. So, all fingers crossed, the RAM crash demon might finally be purged, and people won't any longer get crashes every time something slightly graphics intensive loads. Touch wood, fingers crossed, but seems to actually be a big step in the right direction!
In difficulty mode news, things are coming along. Red is pretty much done, and is extremely hardcore. I went ahead and made Red not save maps on death just like old Rain World 1.0, because some people mentioned missing that feature.
The main thing about Red is eating meat:
Animation is perhaps not quite there yet, but you get the idea. Don't want it too gory, but would rather just suggest the concept through the movement of the characters. Might take a little tuning!
Yellow is coming along and is generally easier in a bunch of ways, some of which are specifically targeting karma-related frustration. Some people want to see the game but just can't deal with the punishment, and Yellow is supposed to go in that direction without necessarily scrapping huge game mechanics. So just a little easier to steadily progress and see new pretty backgrounds, without being beaten into the ground too brutally for a random slip. It's still going to be rain world of course, with lizards hunting you and stuff like that, but just a little bit more approachable.
So all in all, good progress!
— Home
), stuff thats only apparent later in the game, and its just luck that I happened to triple check before it went out. 
