Hello! I figure it's about time for another devlog. I've gotten some good info from the playtests, so I guess I'll start by going over that.
Players were doing tutorial missions in the wrong order and not learning the intended moves. I've remedied this by making some of the 'trick' requirements chained together, so you have to complete all of them within a few seconds or else they reset back to uncompleted. I also added a "start dashing here" trick to indicate where to start from.
Players were swooping instead of diving during the flight school mission. I remedied this by changing the control prompt to say "swoop ... bounce" just like the dash. Both swoop and dash are intended to be chained with a bounce, it's just that one of them can only be done in the air and one of them can only be done on the ground. They have separate controls because I generally want the dash/boost button to be the "go fast" button, and swoop pauses movement for a short moment before redirecting your momentum downwards (with a boost). That means that the swoop button doesn't do anything when you're on the ground, so I'm tempted to add additional ground-based moves for that button but I haven't thought of what would be appropriate yet. Crouch would make sense, but let's be honest, with my character's proportions it's not really going to have that much utility.
Players were having a lot of trouble with the platforming segments. I took inspiration from a Valve developer commentary about the bridge section in Half-Life 2 and made it so your friction is doubled if you've got a ledge in front of you. I also made it so that you can hit the jump button before you hit a wall and it'll queue up a wallkick for you instead of switching to fly mode. I also upped friction a lot when holding the walk button, to make it easier to come to a stop (although I do wonder if this removes some of the challenge of being weighty?). There's also one walljump bug that keeps getting players but I haven't managed to figure it out yet.
People had a lot of fun with the wallboost mechanic, but I actually kind of hate how it trivializes height gain. I implemented an angle limit so you can only do it around rounded edges, and I also gave it a 3 second limit before you need to touch the ground again.
I don't want to just release another playtest with fixes for what was already there, I want to make the most of it and have new things to do each time. So I'm currently thinking about how the story is going to start out. In my world, plane dragons are just creatures that were there always, and we based airplanes off of them. Intelligent, nomadic, but also pretty rare. This plane dragon sort of happened upon the critter settlements, and gains their trust over time, starting with mail delivery. I'm going to restructure quests in terms of "episodes", with cutscenes in between. I don't want to put a whole lot of effort into cutscenes at this stage in development, but I'll leave space in there for them.
Solatorobo is a pretty big aesthetic inspiration for me, so I definitely want to do some ancient ruins type environments. Probably not going to take much inspiration from the story though, we don't need more dark edgy backstories.
I've had a stressful few weeks, so I'm hesitant to work on the game when I'm in that state for fear of associating that feeling with working on it, and losing my enjoyment for it. But making little animations and implementing them is a small enough task that adds polish and is fun to see the results of, so I've been doing a bit of that. I want to figure out how I can make the internal view more interactive. Maybe not have it required for gameplay because that breaks up the flow, but I think it would be fun to have your sidekick go in and pet them or something.
new boost anim #endotaxi
— Catboy Slim (@catboyslim.gay) September 5, 2026 at 1:08 AM
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push #endotaxi #vore
— Catboy Slim (@catboyslim.gay) September 7, 2026 at 11:28 AM
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