A slightly early new baby and an Early Access release. That was busy!

And then: the work of iterating on pitches to try and get JARPUG on the Oculus Quest. I was programming and artin' and all that, too. But it was a week or two or more of slide work taking up much of my work time, with several laps of helpful suggestions from Oculus Start. I received a short but polite rejection. The game's still early and I'll keep trying, but this certainly lowers the priority of optimizing the game for mobile. The game's got good bones for it, though. I made sure of that.

I've also sent in a pitch for a port of a different game to a different console. You can probably guess.

That was two too many presentation PDFs for my taste. But it gave me a break for some perspective, at least. That other port could be great. And I've finally hammered out the story points necessary to justify JARPUG's more explicit VR interactions.

SCOOTBLOCK

JARPUG makes fine use of VR for "tabletop" feeling battles. Its UI and exploration both feel good in VR. But I want to try out more explicit VR interaction, too!

The scootblocks in JARPUG allow for multiple intersecting paths that you drag the blocks around on, making for (potentially) more complex puzzles. They can push physics objects too, which could be fun. The interaction handle should be reusable for a few other fun things, too!

I also modeled some simple "trail pieces" to help show players where they can drag these blocks in a way that makes in-world sense. The generator for these paths takes a single button click and really makes it easy to drop these things into the world. It isn't quite as robust as the world's tile logic. It doesn't need to be.

Improved movement physics

slower, consistent jumps! mantling!

JARPUG uses the world's physics simulation to help move its character around. That's got some real advantages, especially in a puzzle-y game. But I really didn't like how abrupt and inconsistent the game's jumping felt around walls. Bumping into walls mid-jump lowered a jump's height. That's a reasonable result of physics-based movement. It also makes for some real bad video game platforming.

I've added a system that looks for nearby walls and edges and keeps the pug from outright rubbing on them, especially mid-jump. That same information is used to mantle edges when the dog is short by less than half of their own body height. I can't be too generous with that mantle height; it would make the game's platforming puzzles too large! And have you seen those dog arms? They can't do more than that.

All of that also let me slow down the jumps a bit, making them more readable.

Status Effects

There were a couple skills (poison zone, charge zone) that seemed obviously related to status effects in the initial alpha release, but they ended up only being straight healing/damage spells with unique damage types. Now I've built the actual framework for applying and displaying status ongoing effects in battle.

A skill can apply a list of status effects on hit. All status effect spells are 100% applied at the moment. I do plan to have enemies and player gear that are outright immune to some status effects, but I'm trying to avoid squishy chance-based status effects for JARPUG. I'll have to see what's actually fun and balanced, but the strategy feels crunchier when you're choosing and receiving the status effect outcome in such clear-cut terms.

That said, with 100% application chance, a lot of traditional annoying status effects that disable are probably out, or at least extra-rare/expensive. I'm okay with that. They're annoying. I also am not designing these status effects to get stacked. They'd frankly be too easy to stack with that application chance, and VR begs for easy-to-read UI. Stacked lists of status effects are pretty antagonistic to big and simple UI.

Status effect icons are shown over the affected character's head, and they can also be tinted a color by some status effects. I also took this opportunity to add tiny health bars under every enemy.

The current status effects are:

• break: lower magical defense
• charge: raise physical attack
• poison: deals a small percentage of max hp in damage per turn
• lure: enemy runs toward the defined lure point on its turn

I suspect that positional and movement based status effects will be pretty important in this game!

I still want to experiment with actual "zones" dropped on the ground during battle that apply status effects and damage. I plan for them to be a player-team-only thing, as the ground could get too dang confusing otherwise. It could also be very annoying to call your teammates into a poison zone on accident.

BYE

Also I fixed some bugs and stuff, but of course I did. I hope to have the next release out in August, and the next next release a bit quicker after that. Peace!