v0.1-1 changelog

Greetings, delivery enthusiasts!

I wanted to give Cloud Courier one last day's worth of effort before we look ahead to decide what the future holds for this project. In the recent post-mortem, I talked about how level generation guided players away from engaging with the game's mechanics and play space as intended, and doing something that addressed that while still holding true to the sort of work that was achievable during the jam is something I've been wanting to do since before the jam ended.

The new system places wide air streams at the very top and bottom of each level, guiding players outward toward the edges of the play area and inward toward the centre respectively. These act as a safety net - a reliable outer network of air streams that can get a balloon from any horizontal position to any other horizontal position, but isn't particularly quick.

In addition to this, the game now creates a series of air streams that run from left to right across the level without gaps, and then vertically offsets each one to make navigating them feel more technical. That's done from left to right as well, creating much more complex and dynamic-feeling air stream layouts than the previous quick and dirty above-and-below-each-island approach.

While I was working, I also added some quick sound effects that I'd recorded while doing audio for my most recent "full" game release, reworked the differential altimeter to look more like a spirit level, and added a tent to the "home island" that can be visited after completing 5 deliveries to move to a new level.

This will likely be the final update to the "jam version" of Cloud Courier. Regardless of what comes next, I'm proud of what the three of us accomplished here, and I'm thankful for the kind comments that players have shared with us.

Enjoy!

Full changelog:

• Added a tent on the home island that can optionally be visited after 5 successful package deliveries to go to a new level
• Added climb sound
• Added lateral thrust sound
• Added small lateral thrust sound
• Added UI select and UI hover sounds
• Added unused UI open and UI error sounds
• Updated level generation to consistently place wide top and bottom air streams pushing outward and inward respectively
• Updated level generation to place air streams based on a full level-width line in either direction broken up and offset vertically for more interesting navigation options
• Updated air streams to be arbitrary length
• Updated air stream overlap multiplier to be based on AABB intersection
• Updated differential altimeter to use a spirit level style presentation
• Updated air stream particles to be local to scene
• Updated level background to be wider
• Updated HUD package pop in to use elastic easing when appearing
• Updated package tally to be reset on death
• Updated Cheese's credits avatar
• Updated supporter credits and special thanks
• Refactored menu music handling
• Refactored zone processing to allow for non-pickup zones
• Refactored marker position calculation
• Fixed bad padding on Albuffalo's credits avatar
• Fixed being able to pause while a pause transition is in progress
• Fixed being able to start a new game or resume a paused game while a game transition is in progress
• Fixed some gdscript warnings
• Fixed bad initialisation on AABB extents calculation