v0.3 Released

The (hopefully) stable and relatively final version of the Deatbeat Simulator is finished!

After all the edits and fixes, I finally mustered the strength to run through and test everything was working fine. A lot of issues had arisen from all my tinkering that I wouldn't have known about if I hadn't managed it, and even though it led to the better part of two days being spent debugging issues that made no sense and brute forcing new management systems into place - including new z/y depth checking and a more responsive interactor - I felt productive and progressive.

Some things have been made simpler, others more complicated. Nothing for the player, of course, just for me, and I'm very excited to see where these decisions take me. Nirvana? A ditch? Who knows!

A saving system is now also in place - the game auto-saves on exit and can be resumed from the game menu. This wasn't going to be enabled until a real release but it made bugfixing a LOT more efficient so I'm leaving it. Might as well let players know what the game's gonna be capable of.

And, after several updates, I think the grocery store crash is finally taken care of. I couldn't make it trigger in the editor or the built .exe, so I feel confident in calling it solved. Please, no applause - I know achieving the bare minimum months after release is exciting but please, some decorum. With this, it should be actually possible to complete the demo. About f***ing time.

Lastly, I decided to switch the tilesets back to the ones I'd been using from the start (Clean City by GuttyKreum and Modern Interiors by LimeZu). I like the look of the colorful Omega Modern sheets but not for this game. Since editing the assets is allowed under the OM license, I split the difference by color-matching some OM tiles to the Clean City and Modern Interiors palettes to incorporate the (very few) unique ones the former had.
This not only involved image manipulation and tilemap generation - thereby making all the time I'd spent switching the tilemaps out worthless - but a more or less redesign of all three game areas. The result was an absurd amount of time spent trying to make things look decent despite having no visual design experience/education/talent. I've said before, I'm not a mapper, but at least there's an example of the aesthetic I'm aiming for in place.
Besides, I needed something else to procrastinate the final run-through of testing. Which is done now.

So if there are any issues/complaints/suggestions/critiques, please let me know! Things are closer to 'done' than they've ever been and barring anything major I think I might be ready to move on from 'demo' to 'an actual game'. Small tweaks and changes I won't bother making a new version of the demo for, but if anything big gets changed I'll probably consider it.
New mechanics and the like I'll probably leave to QA testers, if I ever get to that point. I'll have to look for them eventually, might as well delegate tasks for them this far ahead of time.

Once more, thank you for reading this, if you are. And thank you for downloading, if you did. But above all, thank you for playing. If you do. Please let me know in as much or as little detail as you like how you found your experience, and feel free to tear apart every aspect and mechanic you find. I'm not here to feel good, I'm here to do something.

Love and kisses.

EDIT: I'm aware of the graphical glitch in the Roulette minigame in the supermarket  - just a case of something being divided by an int instead of float. It doesn't affect gameplay and has already been fixed, though not in the downloadable version because I'd rather not re-export and re-upload for such a minor fix.