I’ve been adding some more features to the Lua system, the specifics of which are kind of too much to remember in its entirety. From the top of my head, I’ve added the ability to interact via button-presses with scripted sequences (for QTE style stuff, if, for some reason, you want to do something like that in a mod). It’s also possible to change the number of consecutive jumps the player can pull off without touching the ground. While this can most traditionally be used for things like double jumps, I can imagine mod authors also playing around with the game physics to do things like swimming or flying (like Joust/Balloon Fight).

The game also supports external parallax maps, which for some strange reason, wasn’t really possible to do until just recently.

Contentwise, I’ve completed the majority of Ladder World, but I’m thinking of expanding it a bit as it takes an awfully short amount of time to get through it all. I also just completed a new cutscene (which is why the aforementioned Lua changes were made in the first place), and I’ve got to say it’s pretty cool how complex I’ve managed to make it considering the primitive nature of the scripting tools. The new cutscene also required me to write two new songs, but it was well worth the effort.

Some things to take note of:

• The new tileset. I’m not exactly 100% happy with it, nor am I too happy about the work-in-progress level design of this new area, but I’m sure I’ll get it to a point that I’m happy with it after another couple of hours worth of revising.
• The new HUD, which is a lot more compact, and a lot less obstructive than the old one (I hope?). Its design comes from a suggestion made by forums member DOUGLAS.
• Ip is also holding a custom weapon that’s running off the new weapon code. What’s not apparent here is how the bullets move — the two squarish bullets move in a sine-wave pattern while the narrow bullet fires straight. This demonstrates the customizable bullets, which go beyond simply setting graphics/damage/speed values. One example weapon I’ve made fires a bullet that is affected by gravity and hops along the ground.
• How adeptly I have avoided those fireballs.

In addition, I’ve also finished up the majority of the new shoes equipping system, which allows modders to modify the player’s movement. With a little bit of clever coding, you could also get shoes to do other things — for example, double jumps, wall kicks, etc. Hopefully this’ll allow modders to come up with unique gameplay mechanics for their mods.

Speaking of mods, a couple more great mods have come out in the past month:

Space Mod, by Kenju launches Ip into Outer Space to investigate a giant asteroid. Though the mod is considered a demo, there’s an incredible amount of polish in this mod, including new characters, great dialogue, and really well designed levels.

A New Game, by Youhr, which is a little rougher around the edges, but makes up for it with a lot of really interesting design choices, like, for example, a single level that you can revisit throughout the game where the majority of the game’s Life Toast can be found. This mod is also a demo, but it contains more than an hour’s worth of gameplay.

As always, if you’re interested at all at modding the game, be sure to check out the forums, as there’s a small community of people who’re willing to help. In the coming months I’ll be uploading updated versions of the engine for modder, as well, which’ll allow them to use these new features in their mods.

After hours and hours of relentless working, I’ve got a system that allows for (drumroll, please) moddable weapons!

You can customize bullet movement with LUA code, change how much damage they do, change how a weapon looks, sounds, feel, whatever. It’s a pretty robust system, and after messing around with it for a few hours, I’ve come up with some simple, but interesting weapons.

Hopefully, this, coupled with the new inventory system I introduced not too long ago, will allow for a much more diverse range of weaponry and play styles. I’ll probably be releasing a preview build with the new inventory/weapon/achievement systems soon — though the preview won’t really contain any new content, as I intend it to be a tool for mod makers more than a new version of the main game for people to play through.