Fell Friday Update #31 - New Portraits, New Outfits, Story Battle

As usual, a busy week!

We've been adding a lot of improvements this week, most of which came from our Beta Backers (thanks guys!). After talking it over with them, we're also going to be releasing more frequent beta builds on a different Steam branch. Those builds are going to be more up-to-date and a tad more experimental.

On the code side, we updated to the latest version of Unity this week, in part for better Xbox One support and also for many Unity bug fixes. Not a big difference to the end user, but it had to be done at some point.

After breaking our save file backward compatibility this week, we decided to change our save files format from binary serialization to XML serialization, because it will be much easier to maintain the backward compatibility from now on that way. Also... save files are about 50% smaller that way (which is ridiculous, since a binary format should always be more efficient than XML, but it seems the C# binaryformatter format is actually pretty terrible, unless you have very large arrays to save).

We've made a number of improvements to the UI during battles, including updating our ability description box to show a lot more data than before. We're still adding more bells and whistles in that area, so expect things to get even better pretty soon!

We also fixed a bunch of bugs, including a nasty leak that was preventing unused sprites to be unloaded under certain circumstances and bloating up the amount of memory used.

Finally, we had a slew of updates on the AI front, making enemies smarter and less annoying (looking at you Defending Knight!), especially near the end of a battle.

We also finished our next story battle, which looks roughly like this:

On the art side, we have some more portraits (don't we always!):

And our final bunch of character outfits is almost done, with this female pirate outfit, as well as a new hat for a secret class designed by one of our Kickstarter backers: