"Let's hope the next update won't take us another three months! (hehe)"

Well... you know how it goes around here.

What have I been up to these last 

*looks at the calendar* 

*gulp*

4 months?

Well, most of the time I've been sitting here being lazy and not having anything to do, due to coronavirus and such. But other than that I finished my final exams and I worked on another game project for a month or so, so it didn't all go to waste! (Also that other project is on halt for now, don't get your hopes up.)

But now I have returned, even stronger than ever before! Realtalk, I have actually been productive this past month and managed to stuff some nice little extras in this stable 1.3 release, so let's look at the new things compared to the first beta release:

Lots and lots of bugfixes:

I mean, no one should be surprised here, but the beta was a bit buggy. So I fixed a lot of stuff. The game should be more stable than ever now, at least!

New levels 1-1 and 1-2:

Yeah, the first two levels were like way too difficult, so I finally got around to making new ones. They are way easier and way simpler, so that is good I think. If you happen to be one the few people liking the old levels, don't worry, they are still in there: They are now optional levels called 1-A and 1-B and require you to get three golden stars in 1-1 and 1-2 respectively to unlock them!

Binoculars and camera limiters:

Up until this point, you could get pretty lost in some of these levels. Sometimes you just would not know where to go. Other times, you would stand before a pit and wonder whether there might be a coin down there. And again other times you would play a level for the first time, die to some stupid spike and scream: "How should I have known?!" 

Hopefully, all of this should lie in the past now: I have added some binoculars here and there for you to scout out the level ahead of you (yes, these are inspired by Celeste, as I mentioned in my previous post, that game is amazing). Also, your camera will now stop at locations where there is certain death awaiting you, so you should not run into invisible death boxes anymore.

Advanced speedrun timer:

As per request of a single playtester, we now have some more speedrunning tools implemented in the game! I have added the option to display speedrun splits, just like in your regular external speedrun timer (like livesplit for example). With these, you can run against your personal best and see whether you are faster or slower at each checkpoint. And since this wasn't enough, you can also compare your splits against the current world record on the global leaderboard for that level! Of course, all of this can be deactivated if you don't want to use it.

Many QoL things:

I have changed a lot of subtle things in the past beta updates that would be too many to list them here. Some small examples include:

- You can press "T" (rebindable in options menu) to restart the level. Useful for speedrunning.

- Better, more organized options menu. The last one got pretty stuffed in the end, so we now have a much cleaner one.

- Interaction prompts and tooltips everywhere. You should no longer be standing in front of anything without knowing what it does or what button you have to press.

 - All interaction prompts and tutorial hints actually update when you rebind the keys! (I am pretty proud about this one)

- You can see what exactly you have to do to get the next star in the win screen! Before, only I really knew these values which made no sense.

If you want to read up on what else is new in this version compared to the last stable version, 1.2.1, you can check out my last post here.

As always, have fun with the new stuff, and if you've got anything to say, come hang out in our discord server and report your bugs and feedback there, I would really appreciate it!

See you soon™!

PS: I just got the linux export working, so that is a thing now as well!