I'm not sure when it was that I decided I needed several big changes in order to warrant releasing an update, but I've noticed it's happening more and more recently. Alright, into the details - this update is yet another visual overhaul!

There are three main features in this update:

Wind Walls and Wind Tunnels

Wind walls have been added to prevent players fron going out of bounds, and getting to specific areas early. The idea is the wind walls will be removed gradually with time as you progress, slowly giving you access to the whole map. Before you waste your time trying, it's not possible to break through them, at least to my knowledge - the centre of each wind wall is solid, so even if you manage to get past the wind, you still have a normal wall to deal with. Wind tunnels act as one-way doors through wind walls - once you get pulled into one, you can't escape until you reach their destination!

They could both do with a little improvement (mostly graphical or optimisation), but some of the changes I'd want I'm unsure how to do, so they'll be fine as is for the time being.

New Background and Daylight Cycle

What it says on the tin! Out with the old clouds, and in with the new parallax clouds, which give a much better sense of height! There's also a new daylight cycle and shaders for said new clouds, and I'm very happy with how it came out. It allows me to define custom colour palettes for each time of day, which I can fade between to make each time feel distinct and make a full cycle.

For those of you who are interested, the way it fades between colours is by using the Oklab color space. The more common Hue Staturation Value (HSV) system which most paint programs use these days is pretty flawed - the colour wheel it produces is mostly mathematical, and doesn't reflect the way human vision sees colours (this is why many colours on it seem to take up so little space). It's quite interesting, so here's a good site to see exactly how it works.

Terrain Look Overhaul

People kept saying the game looked good, but the rocks were holding it back, so they've had quite the makeover! The insides of them are now darkened, and their texture is now procedurally generated in a shader, and it looks a lot better! The result might theoretically repeat, but it would be too far away for that to really matter. It's also helped fix an issue that has been plaguing me for a while - the hidden caves were too hard to spot, as there was not much there to indicate it wasn't a real wall. Now, I can use the same system to use a blurred black shape to hide it. You'll see what I mean.

Closing Thoughts

So... I'm pretty happy with how this update has come out! I know I keep saying this, but this should really set me up well for adding in the next area. Graphically, I think the game is now exactly where it needs to be, though it goes without saying it's likely there will be minor improvements to it over time. Well, only one way to see what they will be!