Switching from ASCII to tiled bitmaps.

Date: Sun, 19 Jan 2025

Genre: Action, Adventure, Indie
Developer: Second Variety Games
Release Date: Mon, 14 Dec 2015

What's New:

Permanently switched graphics from ASCII to tiles, replicating most ASCII effects in tile form (damage splash, blood).
Renderer migrated from SDL1 to SDL2, no longer using unstable custom OpenGL code
New intro level
Enhanced ending level providing proper closure to the story
Improved music in several places
More responsive movement when rapidly changing direction
Small level changes (lighting, tweaks to story)
Primitive inventory system (mostly to make Torches for dark places at this time)
Ability to travel back and forth between levels a la Hexen hubs - useful to grab health or scrap
Beta option to use mouse aiming (still limited to 8 directions, obviously)
Game no longer pauses on player thoughts or NPC quips; other minor cosmetic improvements

Known Issues:

Inability to switch back to ASCII mode at this time (too many rendering pipeline changes). NOTE: old ASCII version is now available in "beta" branch with password "asciigraphics"; however, it also lacks all the non-graphics updates that made it into the bitmap version.
Unresolved water warping effect picked up during SDL2 migration
Video resolution options are not there at the moment; game defaults to desktop resolution
"Previous weapon", "Next weapon", "Next Inventory Item" keys are missing, thus complicating the mapping of controller buttons to keyboard

(Possible) Future Plans:

Random campaign generation with achievements for passing the first 2,4,8,16, etc levels without dying.

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