Devlog #106 + Monstergirl poll #33 is on! (Patreon)

Whu-!!
This is Stella, a Gardevoir I drew a while back. I arguably had too much fun with the design ^^
I wasn't able to get a new character/new design in time. I was hoping to at least get some Mimic girl chibi sprites ready, but I got sick right after Christmas and lost a few days because of that. I had to prioritize the new build, so I figured I'd share Stella here instead!
Of course, she won't appear in the game. Or at least, not as is. I'm planning on redesigning her someday to remove the Gardevoir parts, possibly as an Axolotl girl. She'll get the actual BEW background once that's done ^^

Here are all the monstergirl ranks:

Rank 1

Rank 2

Rank 3

Rank 4

Rank 5

Also, Happy New Year!

I managed to get a lot of very important stuff done just in time this month!
First of all, the 45 FPS cap has been removed, and all of its consequences have been fixed! I explained it in the last devlog, but basically, if the game felt like it was running too fast and was too hard, this will help! If not, it will now look much smoother! As I expected, it was a huge pain. Here is a list of timings that are affected by this fix:

Save animation
Fight victory/defeat animation (landing chibi)
Auria Slingshot
Auria shmup
Auria fake wall reveal
Kururin puzzle laser speed
Kururin puzzle Laser HP
Broken item (e.g. barrels) blinking speed
Mush smash
Night dome star speed
Night dome star lock animation
Rank up animation
Portrait boing speed
Enemy spell attacks (e.g. Klehss' tentacles)
Player relic attacks
Newer Shapes
Fight start animation
Fight end hit
Enemy spell delays
Enemy summon delays
Buff & debuff delays
Mushroom blocks & Gravity shifters
Chibi jump back & forth animation
Chibi happy animation
Every cutscene
Angel sequence
And maybe a few more minor things I'm forgetting about right this moment. Of course, there's always a chance I'll edit a few more things in the future.

Next was the first step (and in all likeliness, the biggest step) in fixing the memory leak. In the previous demo, every texture was loaded at all times. I knew I'd need to change that eventually, but I figured I could still get away with it in the new demo. I was wrong! After a lot of optimization and texture management, the number of texture pages loaded in memory at all times went down from around 150 to about 30 at most, usually less. Needless to say, it was a much needed change, even if it might not sound very exciting from the player's perspective.
I did waste some time trying to implement a certain Gamemaker extension to help with this which while very well done, ended up not working out for BEW. It's all good though, and I got to learn and improve a few things along the way, at least.
So yeah, this will help a lot!
Of course, this comes at a price: loading times. These are pretty short and I've done my best to hide them as much as I can so you won't usually notice them, but there are a few cases where I couldn't figure out a seamless way to do so. In particular, in the character select screen and in the Amplification screen. They're short enough that I don't think it's much of an issue though, and I can always come back to it if I figure out a better way to do this!

These 2 things took the majority of the month, but were extremely necessary. I'm very very happy to have that behind me ^^

Here are some more improvements and fixes I worked on along the way:

Various minor dialogue/other improvements in some cutscenes
Thin clouds disappear in the Auria escape cutscene (27) after the pod has moved > fixed
Chibi animations can update 1 frame late in some instances > fixed
Slightly tweaked Angel patterns/animations
Angel's fullscreen thorn attack was broken and sometimes (often) left no space for the player to be safe in > fixed
Angel has a shorter weakened window (Elongates the fight a bit and gives the player more opportunities to rest their fingies while charging the next attack)
Heart regenerates faster the more heartshells have been lost during the Angel sequence
Dialogue was meant to be unskippable for a few frames right after the text is done appearing to prevent accidental skipping. This turned out to not have been in effect, until now!
Tril smash crash > fixed
Kururin rune's spinning sprite is slightly offset > fixed
Kururin puzzle's laser sprite is now wider
The background in the Cursed Lance was broken. It was because of the way I made the star radar work, which triggers a special object event that I'd forgotten was already in use by that background. It's fixed now!
Also, I slightly updated the look of the waves in Sablee. They have this ugly black outline which has to do with scaling the sprites. I tried something different which removes it, but causes them to look slightly pixelated instead... It's not perfect, but I'd say it's a bit better.

So yeah, that's a bunch of stuff taken care of! There is still more to do before the public demo release, including but not limited to:

Implement SFX
Commission & add new tracks
Optimize the audio system
Draw the chibi ranks / remaining chibis
Fix more bugs & update some minor things
Add character skills
Rebalance everything
Add party interactions
Create and implement new rooms
Add a few more cutscenes
Add quests

I'm going to focus on bug fixing first. The only major bug left is one that can lock some paths that should be open. the reasn why isn't clear to me yet, but it seems to happen mainly in rooms where 2 door multistates are present. I'll also take care of more minor things, like T being out of the room after the first cutscene in Biscotti. I'll surely be done with this within the month, but I don't know what I'll work on after. i'll see once I get there!

I also need to commission more character art so I can catch up with the monstergirl polls, of course. Speaking of:

The next monstergirl poll has begun! You can now vote for the monstergirl you want to be included in BE Witches in the Discord if you are a 2$+ patron!

The poll will be active until the 12th of this month. After this, you will be able to change your submitted modifier until the 15th. Finally, the two rounds of the modifier poll will take one week each afterwards.

Monstergirl poll rules

Poll submissions

Also, now is a good time to submit a monstergirl and/or modifiers if you haven't already as a patron! If you can't think of anything to submit, here is a list of ideas you can choose from. You'll need to join the server to submit anything!

And that's all this for time! ^^