More bug smashing! Bugs from before, bugs from previous bug fixes, new bugs! Christ I just wanted to be a game developer and make cool dungeons and stuff, now apparently I'm moon lighting as a bug exterminator :P

Despite the occasional new issues introduced, we are however making some serious progress here. I'm taking the time to do a lot of rewriting behind the scenes whenever a crash report forces me into some dark, horrifying section of the code base. So the hope is that not only are we getting all the current bugs worked out but the code base will be much easier to work with going forward.

My strategy has generally always been to write stuff as simple as possible when first implementing it without any consideration for future expansion. This tends to let me move quickly when adding new content or mechanics and not litter the code w/ prematurely generalized systems.

Typically later on I'll find that there's some new mechanic or special case that needs to be added to the previous base code. In this case I tend to just hack it in. I'll do this a few times and sometimes I never need to touch it again in which case it just sits there.

However, and this is whats happened with a lot of these messy parts of code, eventually some of these things turn into just a mess at which point I go in and actually 'systematize' everything in some clean way that handles all the special cases, variations etc.

So far this method seems to be working out. It lets me play with new features quickly, grow and change them quickly, and as long as I do periodic clean ups like these last few weeks, everything tends to stay reasonably clean.

Anyways, enough of that, onto the update:

BUGS_AND_CRASHES:
- Ballistas and other rotating enemies will now save their orientation.
- Cannons are no longer partially visible when out of view (they were treated like turrets and other stationary enemies).
- Flying characters will now take damage from spreading electricity when in steam (previously steam was handled like water and it assumed a levitating character was 'above' the steam).
- Polluted water now makes characters 'wet'.
- Drachnid archers will no longer attack-step their way out of nets.
- Fixed auto explore not attacking crates
- All stationary enemies are now unstableImmune i.e. they won't become unstable if some ice gets under them.
- Fixed a crash w/ hellfire (and other spells) when way to many enemies are on screen at once. tape & scissors had reported this as due to teleporting while charmed (which I still need to investigate), but this was actually due to mousing over your hellfire scroll with some absurd number of slimes on screen and there weren't enough targeting boxes to display.
- Fixed the charge lock up (happened every time).
- Turn count is now saved and loaded correctly
- The 'Partially Explored' auto explore should now correctly try to take you to the trap or obstruction like it was previously doing.

MERCHANT:
- Rand-arts will now sell for 1.5x the base value.
- The merchant will now stock rand-arts.
- The merchant will now sell keys

SLOW_MOVEMENT:
- Changed slow movement from orthogonal only to just take twice as long as normal movement.
- We're gonna have to play with the balance a lot on this one, I'm sure ogres will be running out of food now and slow enemies are going to be quite a bit easier to kite.
- This was probably a long time coming. Originally, when the game was much simpler, I wanted to avoid variable turn timing just since it added unnecessary complexity imo.
- However w/ fast movement already doing this and the necessary introduction of squeeze moves and all the additional special cases and exceptions that introduced its basically become more complicated to have it.
- So despite the fact that I still like the idea of slow movement being orthogonal since it opens up interesting movement strategies, this is just going to be a cleaner option moving forward imo.
- Curious to see what people think of this change and any suggestions for balancing / improving it.
- This also fixes like 100 bugs related to both pc and npc pathfinding, auto-exploring, all sorts of odd interactions w/ multi-moving abilities etc.

Oh yes and a reminder that I'm on discord every Wednesday and Saturday at 4:00pm PST to hang out and chat about the game.