Fixes for large monitors, general improvements.

Not having a slab of 4K myself, I had to debug by phone tag so it took a bit.

I've seen that my game's diversion to the road less travelled on not one but nearly every mechanic and convention results in players being like a monkey on a treadmill, confused and tripping around, for at least the first 30 minutes, and they don't have any reason to respect what I've authored and so won't make the leap of faith to understand. The furniture warehouse filled with teddies was meant to be the tutorial, but now I need to make a tutorial for the tutorial; I have also seen that mercy isn't always kind, in that a player getting hit in the face by pillows endlessly or getting their shins sliced up by angry doodles would probably rather just die. So I made the doodles walk around saying "peace peace" so you know they aren't hostile, and stepping on a flower will only make it flash and shake while the doodles run over with swords drawn to tell you off. I intend them to be shopkeepers, so I'll just have stepping on flowers temporarily raise prices or something. Then I let a friend test the game and they could not for the life of themselves stop cutting the flowers with their swords -in retrospect the doodletowns being near the start where the player is messing around learning the controls was always a recipe for disaster, and this shows the limitations of procedural generation(I intend to add more structure to the way levels generate, so it's more like a designed level turning itself in knots when you start a new run). So I increased the flower's armor value to an absurd degree and something tells me it still won't be enough.

So I also made the doodles easier to kill, and made them get stunlocked just from parrying you so at least you can keep them back. The funny thing about my game is it's the rare melee fighter where you can attack while moving backward, which is the natural desire of all players, but noone seems to do this, instead moving toward an enemy they're trying to cut well after being within range, so even though the teddy's arms are so much shorter than Nemo's sword they often struggle to cut the teddy before being slapped. A worse case is players who assume sprint and flight are useless will walk away from a teddy which chases at the same speed, at a range too short for Nemo's sword to cut. They could sprint, fly away, or swing the sword one way and slash back with enough force, but instead they end up in a stalemate. So I made Nemo's swords push the teddies back a bit, even when they aren't cutting, and tried to work more pauses into the game in general -it's incredible how much we take for granted the little quirks of npcs, how well they pretend they aren't giving you a break, the rules that limit their attacks... so the teddies now dive more often, especially when they get close, but lie facedown afterwards for a while. Not difficulty or lack thereof, but to experience every changing gameplay state, I think is good design.

I think my game is taken for a novelty, the art looks a bit cheap and doesn't display well outside its native resolution, and the mechanics don't draw people in. So I was in the middle of adding rain effects and a darkness filter when someone asked for options to remove screen effects, well sure my friend, it's yours, but I'll cry a bit for each toggle you disable; I'm sure they primarily meant the pillows that hit you in the face IRL, which I made only trigger if the pillow actually hits Nemo's face and not her shins.

I think that what a first-time player needs to fight first is not a teddy bear, not an even weaker goomba-like thing, but a piece of toast. Maybe a piece of dry toast at most. But I have to make that interesting and fun even for skilled players, a 30-minute tutorial that's like an arcade game you can clear in a minute. Yeah that's possible.

Oh yeah and some of Nemo's sprites are wearing bloomers now. Her idle animation was the first animation I ever drew, and her character design is absolutely brutal to animate -at least for my dumb ass. I originally wanted a design that would mesh with a ghostly wind and rain aesthetic, so I thought a cloak and skirt with a pattern like clouds would look nice, but I realized shading my sprites would be a bridge too far and the project would never get anywhere, not just because my wrist couldn't take it -1080p pixel art is paid in blood. I learned to draw her body by writing out a pages-long guide with a calculator and ruler, and trying to make some abstract sense of why something looked good made me focus on the most perfectly balanced shapes, which is how her incredible hips came to be -there's no exact point for slender legs or too-much-extra, but perfect thiccness requires a fine balance. I thought the effort would justify the journey, but when I drew her at first and tried to put a skirt over top it was like that one horse with a tarp over it wandering the museum in Fear and Hunger Termina. I went a little crazy all like zetsubou shitaaaaaa!!! but then I saw the truth of the universe, how static art drives the outfit design in anime and whatnot, and figured if I made her dress like one of those cape-skirts that's nearly closed at the front that would be enough to turn the unshaded billboard into something, and just not-completely-hiding her physique is more flattering, and so her outfit as you see it was born. I think it's pretty much the ultimate cheatcode to animation, where for instance the animations need to follow your sword instead of the opposite as it is in every other game, so there can be no startup or recovery frames, but there still needs to be a wave of motion even as her swords can remain active, so her skirt does all the work, and actually it's taking on a life of its own more and more. It's too good a trick. But the intended aesthetic is so long ago abandoned now, it's kinda sad. The sudden action pose with her legs revealed creates a strong impact but its too much, it disturbs the atmosphere, and I don't think I'll ever be able to realize what I imagined unless I switch mediums, but I finally got the pattern of clouds and falling leaves in rain on her dress as unmoving plaid, which was enough for the detail of the bloomers to not clash, and the screen doodads and darkness filter brings it all together with the less detailed sprites. Unfortunately the issue of having her doll joints visible somehow returns, but oh well.