I am Overburdened [devlog]

[Rydon]

Glad to see you back at it. Do you have any plans for a new game, or are you just wanting to continue to "sharpen" this one?

[Spidi777]

Thanks Rydon ! It feels exhilarating jumping back into it
Oh, I'm itching to start new projects too , but I have to slide back into game dev with baby steps so to speak. I got to finish my old plans for I am Overburdened first, then I'll start a new thread here immediately and pick my favorite one from my bloated "gameideas.txt" file

[Spidi777]

Two steps forward, one step back.

Hi everyone!

As the title suggests progress has been made, but I took a really bumpy road to get here. I'm done with a new update, but even though I mentioned around two weeks multiple times, it took more than a month :/

Big-ish? Or lots of small-ish?

I wanted to release some of the new goodies of the planned expansion pack without spoiling the new content. Just new functionality. For this to happen I had to make a version of the game which is halfway between my current development build and the existing released builds, which took way more time than I originally expected. Silly me. Regardless of not featuring new content, it does bring lots of convenience features and quality of life changes

Teleport to target

There's a new mouse control mode in town: teleport!
If you play the game a lot and dislike waiting for the movement animations this will speed it up to be *instantaneous.



Path-finding is still the default option for mouse controls, but you can change your settings within the "Options" menu under the "Mouse" sub-menu using the "Control" entry.



* Only the tile-to-tile movement is changed to be lightning fast. Picking up stuff, fighting battles, or opening chests still animate the same way for the sake of clarity.

Localization

The game has been localized to Polish ( )! I'm hoping I Am Overburdened will be enjoyed by more players in Poland thanks to this. Ahoy from Hungary my dear friends

Special thanks to Daniel Oskar Moroz (MorDan) for his awesome work!



This build also includes a bunch of localization text fixes. Typos corrected, a few things renamed, some sentences re-worded, and such in multiple languages.

I would love to add even more supported languages, but at the moment the translation of the updated content is still ongoing. New translations will probably not happen in the near future. I did add support for non-Latin characters/languages (e.g.: Cyrillic or CJK) though, so strides have been made in this direction.
Maybe...

Where credit is due



The game officially supports 8 languages already. For this to happen many people contributed and I wanted to honor their work more appropriately. Previously only the translators of the currently selected language were shown in the credits menu, but now there's a menu entry to cycle through the names of everyone who worked on the texts of the game.

Nightmare and Treasury confusion



There was a "discrepancy" between the Main Menu and the Inn area in the way the Treasury game variant and the Nightmare difficulty can be accessed. In the Inn, the Nightmare difficulty (goat-skull statue) worked as a difficulty toggle and the Treasury mode was a special trapdoor.



Personally, I liked the functionality of the Main Menu much better and it made more sense (to me at least). Nightmare being a different more vicious dungeon and Treasury is simply a game alteration toggle (like the Elite variant or the Stash items).



Now the Inn matches the Main Menu. There's a separate trapdoor for Nightmare difficulty and a toggle (golden lock) for the Treasury variant.

Only fools seek their own destruction



From now on Nightmare difficulty can be unlocked and accessed immediately (without completing a dungeon on Normal first). A present for those who are feeling a bit overconfident

Quality of life

Quite a few menu changes and fixes found their way into the game with this update.



I re-organized the Help menu screens to (better) describe all the inn entities.



For multiple menu entries, "page-turner" widgets were added for enhancing mouse support. These include the "Language" entry of the Options menu, the "Window" and "Scaling" entries within the Graphics menu, and the "Control" entry in the Mouse menu.



Multiple mouse right-click handling and mouse movement focus handling bugs were fixed (Start and Controls screens).

Is it over?

The change list for this update is, but the work on the big content patch is not yet. I know this must be tiring but it is really, really close though. In fact, I'm so close to finishing it, that I don't plan to publish more tiny updates beforehand.

It looks like the next one will be the one and only long-awaited expansion pack which I'm dubbing "The Encumbered Edition"

I still don't want to pick a date since I'm super bad with deadlines ( as you can see ), but I want to give some structure to its release. I will start preparing and posting more info (+screenshots and gifs) about it in the following days.

Stay tuned and take care!

[Rydon]

The game looks really good. I like the feel while playing it also, very tight gameplay wise. Also, congrats on the commitment and sticking with the game for so long.

[Spidi777]

Hello there!

@ Rydon
Thanks for the kind words and thank you very much for your continued support
I think the expansion pack will be to your liking then (I really got to finish it why is it taking so long ?!).
A not so secret focus of it is enhancing the look and feel of the game even further

Hot-fix time. Sadly version 1.2.9. contained some "glitches"

Bugs everywhere

First and foremost please accept my apology for the bugs that I left in the game. Multiple discussions were started and you reached out to me with detailed descriptions and useful reproduction steps. I'm really thankful for having such an understanding and helping community. You are awesome!

Besides delivering the fixes I will do my best to minimize the occurrence of issues of any caliber in future updates.
That is a promise

Nightmare retry

A glaring issue. I'm really sorry about it. I don't know how I could miss this. Originally (before the 1.2.9. update) when retrying or restarting the game on Nightmare difficulty, the new game would also start on Nightmare difficulty. I messed this up with the Nightmare and Treasury shuffling and changes in the Inn and it always switches back to Normal.



Now it's fixed and I wrote some new automated tests to make sure I never break this feature again!

Achievements

An achievement (more specifically Nightmare achievements) related problem was described in a community discussion. I could not reproduce any related errors on my local build, but I did make changes to Nightmare and Treasury mode handling for update 1.2.9., so I decided to look into it. I haven't found any blatant mistakes, but I did put in some extra safety code changes.
Hopefully, if there was any bug in Nightmare achievements handling it is squashed now.

Teleport path-NOT-finding

The new movement mode (teleport) seems to be very well received, which makes me super happy
On the other hand, I did manage to leave a bug in this feature as well



Not a show-stopper, but the path-(NOT-)finding and navigation systems do not handle broken chests correctly (the "Toolbelt" item allows you to break them).



Normally you should be able to plan your movement through the broken chests without a necessary stop.
Now it works as intended.

Next stop

Progress is slower than expected on tying up the loose ends of the expansion pack. Steady, but a bit slow. I may change my mind in the end and release another smaller update beforehand. Will get back to you with the decision soon

Thank you very much for your patience and understanding.
Until then, take care and stay tuned!