The Gathering Dark v0.15 Live!

This one's a shorter stretch than usual, about six days since the last post, so it's mostly shop and feel work plus one bigger system change under the hood.

The shop got a major pass. There's now a reroll button under the shop title, gold cost starts at 50 and goes up 50 each time you reroll in a visit, and it plays out with a fancy animation: the current wares get swept off the table with a random spin, fresh ones generate, and they drop back in from the top one at a time with a bit of wobble. First version had a bug where the new items could fly clean off screen after a reroll (a top-level/global-position mixup), that's fixed now, along with a two-frame layout timing issue in the same flow. Shop card slots also got a "?" info button explaining colourless vs. subclass cards, and cards are now colour-coded by subclass in the shop. There's a new hand-painted wooden table render behind the whole scene too. Steam post image

Hits now ripple the screen. There's a new heat-distortion shader that fires at a marker on the player or enemy on every hit, scaled by how much damage landed - bigger hits, bigger ripple, floored so chip damage still reads and capped so massive hits don't spiral. This is a scoped port of a screen-space effect from a side project, kept deliberately small (no global bloom pass, just this one effect at the hit point) after the full glow/bloom route didn't pan out earlier this year. While I was in the player's hit-reaction code I also ripped out the old per-character hurt-animation state machine (it had been janky for a while) in favour of a proper white-flash that re-asserts itself every frame instead of getting stomped by whatever animation is playing, plus a short hit-stop/screen-flash punch on every hit. Steam post image

Also fixed: the artefact picker's "Take" button could go missing entirely once the tooltip's fly-in animation added a second argument to its signal - the mismatched argument count made Godot silently skip the handler, so the button never got pulled into the open tooltip. Same bug existed in the hometown screen's artefact tooltip and got the same fix. Steam post image

On the map side, biome transitions are generalized now - one function walks the guardian boundaries for any number of biomes, replacing four hardcoded forest/desert helpers. There's a new fog veil across the top of the map that recedes as each guardian falls, and the branch-choice buttons are dynamic now (one per available room) instead of a fixed set of three, so real branching paths can actually display properly. Steam post image Alongside that, first groundwork went in for a new biome, The City, which runs will open into as a short single-path trunk before branching off into the usual biomes. It's stand-in only right now - no unique art or music yet, and it's not visible in builds - but the structure's in.

Smaller stuff: the post-processing pipeline is down to one shader now (darker baseline, more glow headroom), a letterbox colour bug (0–255 vs 0–1 misuse) got fixed, and an unused leftover scene got deleted.

What's new:

• Shop reroll: sweeps and restocks the shop's wares with a throw-off/drop-in animation, gold cost escalating per reroll

• Fixed: rerolled shop items could fly off screen instead of landing in their slots

• New "?" info buttons on shop slots explaining colourless vs. subclass cards, with colour-coded card backgrounds per subclass

• New hand-painted wooden table render in the shop scene

• New heat-distortion hit VFX: screen ripples at the hit point, scaled by damage, on every player/enemy hit

• Player hit-reaction rework: old per-character hurt-animation state machine replaced with a reliable white-flash + hit-stop/screen-flash punch

• Fixed: Artefact picker's Take button could vanish entirely (tooltip signal argument mismatch); same fix applied in the hometown screen

• Map biome-transition logic generalized to support any number of biomes instead of hardcoded forest/desert cases

• New fog veil at the top of the map that recedes as guardians are defeated

• Map branch-choice buttons are now dynamic (one per available room) instead of a fixed three

• First groundwork for a new biome, The City, as the run's opening trunk (placeholder, not yet visible in builds)

• Post-processing merged down to a single shader; darker baseline, more glow headroom

• Fixed a letterbox colour bug; removed an unused leftover scene

Catching up: the full month at a glance

Since a few people won't have seen the mid-month post, here's everything that's landed since the last full release:

• AddedMenagerie pet system7 pets, 35 new cards (base + 2 upgrade tiers each), with portraits and placeholder sprite sheets

• Essence Altar event room fully built, with unique icons/colours for essence upgrades

• New Mirror Barrier status, reworked Ignite

• Enemy kits rebalanced: every enemy now runs 1 power + 3 unique cards, base attack/defend/charge cards doubled

• Gambler scene got a real dice-roll animation; mysterious stranger's face animation updated

• Outer World Portal reworked from a button to dragging cards in

• Reward screen got a radial redesign

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

• Diegetic juice pass across several event rooms: payoff particle bursts, honest tooltips, real SFX, glowing interactive buttons

• New shuffle/discard/tenuous-burn SFX; several status and UI bugfixes (wrong statuses applying, mislabeled map room, shuffle SFX firing on every draw)

• Debug auto-marketing-capture tool got more triggers

• Shop reroll button, shop info buttons, and new shop table art

• New heat-distortion hit VFX and a reworked player hit-reaction system

• Artefact picker "Take" button bug fixed (and the same bug in the hometown screen)

• Map system generalized for any number of biomes, new fog veil, dynamic branch buttons

• First groundwork laid for a new biome, The City

• Post-processing consolidated into a single shader