I just wanted to post an update on the work I've been doing since the game jam. It's a bit of a "dry" one for now as I try to ensure there is a stable and maintainable base in place to take this forward but it's all vital and positive and should make it easier to do the more fun development next!

• Updated and restyled the itch.io page (got access to custom CSS, so this is a continued work in progress)
• Put together a Trello board to help manage our ideas and current tasks
• Fixed a few bugs I was already aware of in the game jam build
• Re-balanced some of the attacks (quick attacks are a bit too powerful, at least if you spam them against the AI - still needs a little more improvement)
• Cleaned up some colliders to resize/reposition during different animations for more accuracte movement-based collisions (damage based collisions were already more accurate)
• Created a new “scene manager”. The game jam build was entirely one scene but this now has to change, both for management reasons as well as to cater for different arenas etc. The new scene manager makes it very easy to manage asynchronously loading/unloading as many simultaneous scenes as wanted.
• …and also hooks up to a loading screen system. An ongoing list of “busy” items is maintained and any object can register itself with (and then unregister itself from) that list. The loading screen automatically reacts to changes to that list and fades itself in/out as required.
• I’ve also started to break some items out into new scenes so that there is a base scene but then a separate scene for splashscreens, main menu, in-game UI, and then there will be a scene per-arena etc. The initial scenes are hooked up and transition from one to the next (or more than one - e.g. arena + UI), smoothly concealed by the animated loading screen.
• To cater for interactions between objects which may or may not be in the same scene, I’ve also made more and more use of scriptable objects. I was already using them quite heavily for interacting with stats so that the game state manager, player controller, and UI could all share the player’s health value, for example, without referencing each other. This is just being extended, including with using scriptable objects to raise events. This allows the UI scene to be fully functional and testable on its own by simply raising these scriptable-object-based events. If there is a listener in the scene (as there would be in game) then it can respond accordingly. If not, the object that raised the event doesn’t need to know or care - it has already done its job just by raising it.
• I’ve also done a little more work on graphical tweaks, investigating performance, and playing with some more music ideas.