After 4 months, hopefully it'll have been worth the wait.
TACTILE is my latest and greatest in video games. In this post I'll talk a bit about it.
WARNING: SPOILERS FOR ENDING! PLAY THE GAME BEFORE READING.
Award for 'Most Overdue Game Yet'
TACTILE was supposed to release in Pixel Day 2022. It did not release in that day.
I decided I would make up for it by using Godot Engine to build it instead of PICO-8. As we'll find out, this was a mistake that spawned my most technically complex game yet.
2D in Godot Engine is fun. It's probably the best thing about Godot. It also has corners missing where there should not be. As a result I wrote a basic map manager.
After loading the last map, if it understands that we hit the limit, it jumps to the cutscene where Cube corners Cone in a room.
Everytime Cube moves in the map, we check the map to see if the move was legal and what to do about the tile we just hit.
If we hit a mud block, we vaguely replicate a similar check, but accounting for turning water/void into floors.
If you fail once, the game locks you out of the true ending.
Award for 'Most Graphically Advanced Game in Newgrounds of April 2022'
This is not a joke.
This is the first time I featured so much 3D in a game. This RPG fight is based on the look and feel of Persona 5/Shin Megami Tensei. If you are on the true ending path, you have a much better spell.
You can still fail this path and be booted back to the normal one. Maybe don't do that.
Most of the nitty gritty is implemented in an AutoLoad I called the "SMT" AutoLoad. It uses a common pattern of mine where I use an AutoLoad to arbitrage communication between 2 any nodes that emit/wait for signals using it. It's like Inter-Process Communication but for nodes. Inter-Node Communication?
There is a banter system that mutes the main characters' shouting to play either Cube or Cone taunting the other every between 15-25 seconds. Simpler than I thought it'd be. Huh.
The Part You're Here For
Decimation Journey is now back in development. As of this writing I am moving back to using Linux as my main driver before I actually do so. Jackson is also going back to drawing new art for the game. Let's talk about what the hell was that secret ending.
I actually straight up imported the first floor (at least at its current state as a test room) and its music into TACTILE and only needed to make a few adjustments.
There might be more changes to it before the demo is out on Pico Day but whatever.
Before you ask YES, the game changes its resolution and enables FXAA to further match the current progress.
I am a stickler for accuracy so I thought it'd be amazing to just straight up make it as if a whole different game just booted up. You can also move/rotate in it. This surprised even Jackson.
The Veredict.
It's finally out. Now I can work on Decimation Journey. I'll be posting quite a bit about it. I hope you enjoyed me doing silly voices on TACTILE. Worry not, there will too be silly voices in Decimation Journey.
I wish this had been out sooner but I was facing a lot of a lingering "spiral of sloth" as to what to do. These past few weeks have been nothing but good work. I am very happy about that. I feel much more experienced thanks to this work.
Personally I don't think anyone will really care about TACTILE. It does not have ENA, it does not have gimmicky gameplay, and I am not backed up by thousands of followers and a fandom. The gimmick was that it became something else entirely at the end. (and then AGAIN in the secret ending.) I like surprising people like that. It makes me happy. If it made you happy that's amazing too.
Have a great day. I hope you will enjoy what's next. This will be very interesting.
