As promised, we’ve overhauled the visual style of all the menus into something slightly more consistent and fitting for Traversion. That’s not all that has changed, we’ve progressed further with revising and detailing the existing levels to make the levels better from both a visual and gameplay perspective. We also found the token/keys area unlock progression system to be unideal, so we’ve scrapped that over a more generous progressive unlock system.

Additions

• The menus have been given a new look.

• The Main Menu will show completed levels in the background. If no levels have been completed, then the tutorial level will appear. The new menu theme’s colours are changed to fit the area the displayed level belongs to. Menu background levels can also be disabled with the launch argument ‘--nomenubglevel’

• Settings for Shadow quality and volumetric fog.

• New shaders for desert levels.

Changes

• The noise overlay added in the previous update (V 0.4.0) has been tweaked to prevent changing on moving objects, to account for mesh scale correctly, and to use the right lighting model this time (whoops)

• The slow fall ability’s cooldown has been changed to reset on ground contact instead of after a delay

• Changed the material for frozen (and slippery) surfaces in the ice levels to help distinguish them from less slippery surfaces

• Changed how friction is applied to the player. Although still hard to control, low friction surfaces can allow the player to reach ridiculous speeds, which should be fun for trying to best your friends’ record times.

• The level overhaul continues! The meadow and ice levels are finished, and we’ve been into the desert levels. You should notice the quality has increased for the game’s early areas.

• The HUD has been improved and should reflect the ability statuses better.

• Gave the grapple pickup a blob highlight to make it easier to notice.

• Engine has been updated to Godot 4.4.1. Players should see slightly better performance and a reduction in compilation stutters. We’ll move to 4.5 for more improvements soon™.

Fixes

• Steam Leaderboards and Avatars should now work again

• Mouse Input ordering on end screens should now work as expected everywhere, instead of just working *almost *everywhere.

• The Volcano level 1 Void Sphere now encompasses the entire playable level, and shouldn’t break when the player reaches the end of the level.

• The end flag’s beacon should now fade out correctly when the player gets close to it instead of inverting.

• Text prompts now format themselves correctly, and have an outline to assist with visibility in low contrast environments.

• Internal changes to collision shape handling mean levels should be smaller on disk, and load marginally faster.

Removed

• Access to the Desert, Volcano, and Mountains levels. These levels, more so than the rest of them, were made in a short timeframe and don’t live up to our expectations. They contain promising mechanics that we’d love to develop, but until we can polish and playtest these levels extensively, we’ve deemed them unfit for playing. These can be re-enabled by using the launch argument ‘--restorelevels’, but we give no assurances these levels will be completable.

What’s next?

Our immediate focus remains the overhaul of existing levels. With the meadows and ice levels complete, we continue working on the desert levels. These levels are fairly good as far as overall design goes, but considerable visual improvements are being worked on. They’ll only take a fraction of the time the meadows and ice levels took, so look forward to them.

In the long run, we’ll be continuing the overhaul on the visual aspect of Traversion, especially in regard to developing a proper identity as a game. This will likely include changes to the menus and UI overall, shader changes, and model revisions.