KatFS Pre-Alpha v0.3.1 is out!

Hello everyone! Here's the first update for the KatFS Pre-Alpha demo of 2024! It adresses a major issue found in chapter 3, but also fits in some nice eye-candy and new gameplay feature.

First and foremost, the bug in chapter 3 that led to enemies respawning upon reloading a save or checkpoint should be fixed now. Chapter 3 activates enemies dynamically based on how far you have progressed in the level to save on performance and keep things more controllable, and while the level would successfully reactivate the correct enemies on reload, since these enemies get activated later than everything else, they would fail to have their data loaded in, causing them to be effectively reset. I've rewritten the way loading works to allow these late-loaded entities to retain their status.

Onto the new stuff! A common feeling I've noticed on myself and most playtesters was that it was hard to gauge how much damage the player was doing to enemies and how close they were to being defeated. The answer: health bars for the enemies! When an enemy gets damaged, their HP will be displayed over them briefly before being hidden again if it doesn't take any more damage. These health bars will also change color to orange if the enemy is on fire, and gray if they've burned out completely (this also applies to the boss health bars).

If you prefer to keep the game visuals simple as they were, these health bars can be turned off in the new Game Settings menu.

I mentioned eye-candy, and it comes as new idle animations for Kalia! She's not the type to stand still for very long after all. If the player takes no action for 3 seconds, Kalia will play one of the 4 new animations at random, and continue doing so until something happens. I hope to add a few more animations for Kalia in the demo, and for the main game all enemies should be getting some as well!

That is everything for now! With this update, we're entering the final stretch of demo updates. There's still at least one or two more patches I would like to release for this demo, with some more visual and gameplay improvements, and a much needed revisit to the chapter 3 landship boss. But for now, farewell!