Studio progress, November 3 — Hostile Environments

Main focus

The level variety art is finished: all eleven new climbs and dips have their own art, among them a wall shelf and grab rail in the vet's waiting room and a stone arch on the park's railway underpass.
An independent art check first came back partial at 8.0, mostly because a bent sewer walkway strip read as a walking cane handle. It was redrawn and the round passed at 8.1.
Medal times for the eleven changed stages were retimed. Most got more generous because the new climbs take time, one gold going from 185 s to 235 s, while one got stricter, 180 s to 160 s. They stay provisional until people play them.
A cat on a swinging perch can no longer be carried into a wall, and the store build caught a test switch that only exists in development builds being read by shipping code. Five test runs today cleared all 24 stages with 0 errors.

Six boss fights were reworked so each has a rule of its own, such as an Ice Crab that can only be hurt from behind and a Core Guardian shielded by pylons. Bullet counts in the four rebuilt fights fell by 41 to 89 percent.
The save system was attacked on purpose: cut at each of its 1,784 possible lengths, bit flipped, and its writer killed 300 times at random moments. No save was lost. It did find one real bug, a backup another program could delete, now fixed.
On a gamepad A now confirms and B goes back on every screen, where before B could start a game or abandon a run. Keys can be rebound, and menu and HUD text is now drawn at the screen's real resolution.
Loading shows the studio logo first and prepares boss art while you are on the map. The worst loading freeze in today's test was 0.9 seconds, down from 2.3.

One boss got a new model after a colour pass could not fix its boxy shape: a domed armoured skull with a crown, burning eye slits and an open fanged jaw. It keeps the same six hit plates, so its fight data is unchanged.
A freeze when a second stage loads in a visible window was narrowed down but not yet fixed: it never happens off screen or minimized, and nine runs ruled out stage length, the bosses, the HUD, dynamic resolution and memory.
On 4:3 screens the HUD's power slots now sit right under the score row instead of about 120 pixels below it, and the material errors on the second stage are confirmed gone in the packaged game.

VOID STRIKE: A quiet day: the scorecard was reviewed and nothing in the game changed.
REIGN OF VALTHERIN Lead game: Work continued in the game's own build.