Meadows, sheep and a soundtrack for every place
This week the levels got their ground textures, grazing sheep and erupting volcanoes, and every place now has its own tune and villagers who each have a voice.
In plain words
Walk across the new meadows and you will notice the ground finally looks like grass, sand and volcanic rock rather than flat colour. Meadow Climb and Longfield got a full meadow kit, Slackwater got sand, and Ember Crossing got basalt and lava-scorched ridges. Sheep and cows graze on the side routes, and some volcanoes now erupt. Each kind of place has its own tune, the levels have their own sound effects, and every villager speaks in a voice of their own. Under the surface, a few busy parts of the game were made lighter, so the frame rate should hold up better in the busy scenes. The orb magnet also got a few playtest fixes: its pull now curves around ledges instead of running in a straight line, and it reaches a little less far.
Under the hood
- Textures (#153): a meadows texture library on Meadow Climb and Longfield, then on six more levels. Sand on Slackwater and basalt in Ember Crossing. A tier switch picks the texture set per level, and the credits list the new sources.
- Terrain: a grass field on Meadow Climb, lava, rocks and volcanic ridges on Ember Crossing, sheep and cows on rough-ground side routes, and erupting volcanoes. Grass clearings are placed per mesh, and
tests/terrainreads back the clumps it placed. Rough-ground collision now overlaps the level's ground. - Audio: a tune per kind of place, level sound effects, and a voice for every villager.
- Orb magnet: the pull follows a curve, past ledges, and the reach is halved after playtest feedback. Roof colliders sit 0.1 m inside the eave so the open sky stays clear for Pip.
- Perf: sheep and cows moved into
grazers.gd, which loads only where there are grazers. The goal flag counts its finds through their nodes instead of preloads.WorldSfxcosts about half as much per tick: it polls at 20 Hz and looks up each node's scripts once. - Playtest tooling: the counted gate reads the median of three probes, so one noisy run no longer decides a result.
- Shadows and camera: the shadow split changed, so the camera anchor screenshots were re-baselined in three parts.
- CI: Git LFS objects are fetched from the runner's own clone address, and the LFS host is taken from
originor the runner rather thanCI_REPOSITORY_URL. - Play this build:
./infra/fetch-build.sh windows