Current and upcoming updates

Gable makes the pedestal below a feather a little more forgiving before she tries her luck. :)

I've been working on a bunch of refinements and fixes for Down Ward. Some of these are aimed at softening the rather jumpy difficulty curve. The gif above shows an example of this, in the newly added (as of update 112) area at the bottom of Carven (level 5).

The way I'm currently planning to approach this is that, rather than taking out a difficult section entirely, I'll add optional detour paths that a player can use to alter the level state in a way that makes the difficult sections less risky. I think this will work well for both the challenge seeking players, and the more laid back players.

This way the really difficult areas aren't as much of a hard gate on progress for players who might otherwise have trouble with them. At the same time, these safety measures are side objectives that won't interfere with the harder more direct paths through the levels, and so they won't force hand-holding on the more challenge oriented players. Likewise, for speedrunning purposes, all the side objectives that make a rout safer, are partial detours, and take more time than forging ahead through the rout directly. That is, no safety switch is ever just on-the-way through a speedrun viable rout.

Another major step towards easing the learning curve is the completely rebuilt tutorial level.

The new tutorial level is much more open and cleanly laid out than the previous one. Since it's the first level that new player's will try moving around in, and they'll be learning the basic mechanics, I've tried to structure it so that everything is playable with or without relying on flight. (Other than the two parts where you specifically learn about flying.) There are lot's of wide spaces for experimenting with flight, but there's also a way to hop to pretty much anywhere you need to get.

More topics are covered in the new tutorial, and hopefully with clearer explanations thanks to the less crowded text. It should also be much easier to backtrack to any part of the level to revisit an area and its information.

The game also defaults to wide view now. If you didn't know the game had a wider view option ... that's partly why it's now the default. :)

There's quite a bit of other stuff in this new update, which I'll explain a bit more in a followup post, to keep this one from getting too long.

Take care all. :)