Menagerie pets, a rebuilt Essence Altar, and a pile of juice v.0.14.1

Menagerie pets, a rebuilt Essence Altar, and a pile of juice

Been heads-down since the last post re-working a lot of the scenes, so here's everything that landed in the meantime.

The Menagerie pet system got its first real pass: seven pets - Bird of Prey, Dino Raptor, Drake, Eldritch Squid, Fennec Fox, Hunting Hound, Snow Leopard - each with a base card plus two upgrade tiers (two card options per tier), so 35 new pet cards in total, plus portraits and placeholder sprite sheets for all seven.

Alongside that, the Essence Altar event room got fully built out (gem display, upgrade paths, the works), essence upgrades all got unique icons and colours instead of sharing generic ones, and a new Mirror Barrier status went in alongside a reworked Ignite.

Enemy kits got rebalanced across the board: every enemy now runs one power card plus three unique cards, and their base attack/defend/charge cards doubled from 1x to 2x each.

On the "make it feel like a real game" side: the gambler scene has an actual dice roll animation now, the mysterious stranger's face animation got updated, the reward screen got a radial redesign, and the outer world portal changed from a button click to actually dragging cards into it to get rid of them.

Forest Guardian card art is finished too - Briarthorn Behemoth, Shade of Sylvan Vengeance, and Wraithwood Guardian all have final painted art.

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A chunk of this stretch went into diegetic juice: Fountain of Life, Howling Altar, Blood Sacrifice, Hunter's Cache, and the Essence Altar all got payoff particle bursts, honest tooltips, and proper SFX, and several plain buttons across those rooms got converted into glowing DiegeticHotspots instead. Blood Sacrifice's logic got pulled out into its own script while I was in there.

New SFX went in for shuffling (a quieter, pitch-varied riffle instead of the old shuffle sound), discarding, and tenuous-burn.

A few real bugs came out of this pass: Blazing Presence and Stone Form were applying the wrong status to enemies, the Essence Altar was mislabeled "Warding Circle" on the map, and the deck-shuffle SFX was firing on every single draw instead of only on real reshuffles. All fixed. Screen-effect tweens (white flash, chromatic aberration, zoom punch, vignette pulse) also now correctly ignore time scale, so they stay smooth during hit-stop freezes instead of stuttering.

Smaller stuff: artefact rarity-outline thickness got tuned down, the card-pack reward art got consolidated onto one shared image instead of eleven separate per-class placeholders, and the debug auto-marketing-capture tool (the one that grabs clips of big hits/kills automatically) got more triggers - it's quietly becoming the thing I use to source footage for these very posts.

What's new:

• AddedMenagerie pet system7 pets, 35 new cards (base + 2 upgrade tiers each), portraits + placeholder sheets (available in full release)

• Essence Altar event room fully built, essence upgrades now have unique icons/colours

• New Mirror Barrier status, Ignite status reworked

• Enemy kits rebalanced: 1 power + 3 unique cards each, base cards doubled to 2x

• Gambler scene dice roll animation, updated mysterious stranger face animation

• Outer World Portal reworked to drag-cards-in instead of a button

• Reward screen radial redesign

• Forest Guardian card art finished (Briarthorn Behemoth, Shade of Sylvan Vengeance, Wraithwood Guardian)

• Diegetic juice pass on Fountain of Life, Howling Altar, Blood Sacrifice, Hunter's Cache, Essence Altar - payoff bursts, honest tooltips, SFX, DiegeticHotspot buttons

• Blood Sacrifice logic refactored out of its old button script

• New shuffle/discard/tenuous-burn SFX

• Bugfix: Blazing Presence & Stone Form applying wrong status

• Bugfix: Essence Altar mislabeled on map

• Bugfix: deck-shuffle SFX firing on every draw

• Screen-effect tweens (flash/aberration/zoom/vignette) now hold up correctly during hit-stop

• Artefact rarity outline thinned, card-pack art consolidated to one shared image

• AddedAuto marketing-capture toolmore triggers added

Demo on Steam:

Hunters Hand