Experimental release: New map, breathing, some fixes

It’s been a hot minute! I caught a cold, then I caught a deadly case of Lightmapping Disease

I’ve been spending a while experimenting with systems for creating levels. The new experimental build’s “house” level is now a weird garage-warehouse-thing with a big pile of columns in the middle.

I want to make a big classical-looking temple for Fen. It deserves a fittingly large place of worship, after all.

I also wound up upgrading to Unity 2022.2, from 2021.3. You shouldn’t really be able to notice (maybe they improved performance?).

Here’s what’s new:

Breathing

I’m working on a system to make Fen breathe convincingly. So, for example, It will take a deep breath before swallowing someone (but only if It’s not at the top of a breath cycle alrady), and will need to take a short breath before growling if Its lungs are empty.

The main difficulty here is the sound. I’m figuring out how I can handle different lengths and intensities of breaths. I figure I’m just going to use fixed-length sounds for the first release, then figure those details out later.

Growth

Fen now grows when eating people. You can’t configure it at the moment; I’ll do that later. The increase in size still doesn’t affect where Fen can walk (I need to design a system for that…).

Once Fen eats a few people, It’ll get large enough to start swallowing you in one gulp. You can also just change Fen’s base size to Huge before starting the game. The growth should slow down as It gets larger.

Fixes

Prey used to get dislocated pretty far from the monster’s stomach when eaten, making the vocals appear in the wrong location. That has been fixed.

I probably fixed some other small things, but I forgot to write them down.

Also, I made this build on my PC, rather than on my Macbook. This shouldn’t change anything, but let me know if the game doesn’t start, I guess.