Hey, Beaver, come on

In an effort to avoid making any progress on the “waking” portions, I’ve been scouring the Japan Dream level for issues.  I’ve found that the best way to find things it so watch someone else play, and the list of bugs that I’ve fixed over the past few days has grown immensely:

– The boss no longer turns toward the player on dying- he just shows the “stunned” animation until disappearing
– Checkpoints now leave the last checkpoint’s worth of level behind, so there are no more disappearing enemies when colliding with checkpoint trees
– Occasionally when mounting a ladder, the player would walk towards it, miss the ladder, and then walk endlessly in the same direction.  Instead of saying “mount the ladder when within x pixels of the center” I used “mount the ladder when within x pixels or past the center”
– I decreased the distance to change an enemy from “roving” to “tracking” if you’re behind him, so you can essentially sneak right up on them now, or sneak past if they’re looking away
– When I got rid of mouse aiming with melee weapons, it made it so that if you were standing right next to an enemy but were facing away, you couldn’t turn to face him using the movement keys.  I disabled collisions with the enemy so you can now walk right past them, though you’ll still be stopped when you first contact them to take damage.
– When you hit the phase 2 boss with the pitchfork, it would toss him in the air, changing his animation back into phase 1 until he landed.  All pitchfork use has been disabled with the phase 2 boss now
– The knives that the guard at the very end threw were hard to notice against the background while you’re busy focusing on the boss; I changed the knives to be Knives On Fire using particle effects, and made the guard dude wear a red shirt for gits and shiggles
– When you knock an enemy that wasn’t a seagull into the water, they would pause at first, but then fall down through the water at the normal falling rate, instead of floating down gently like the gulls do.  I simply forgot to change their mode to “drowning” so it was an easy fix
– The miniboss fight was made a little easier- I decreased the window in which he can hurt you, lowered his roll speed, and added a splotch of red to the samurai-getting-hit animation to make it more obvious when you’ve hit him.
– I couldn’t figure out why I’d added a 1 second delay on loading the starting checkpoint, so I removed it.  Then later, I realized that it was because I wasn’t giving enough time for the flames that the dude sets to your house to delete themselves when you reload that checkpoint.  Instead of adding it back in, I set the flames to invisible (which occurs instantaneously) and then deleted them (which takes a second or two for particle effects).
–  Originally, when using melee weapons, you can only damage an enemy if he’s standing in the same direction you’re facing.  However, when I changed it so that you can walk onto enemies, if you’re standing right on top of him, he might be a few pixels to the right when you’re facing left, even though it looks like you should be able to hit him.  I increased the damage area to include the area behind the player, as far as half of his collision radius.
– It looked to be too hard to jump over the boss, both phase 1 and phase 2, so I decreased the speed of phase 2 and decreased his radius for doing damage by a third.
– The fire-knife guard’s projectiles seemed to be timed (accidentally) almost exactly with when the boss is vulnerable, making it hard to get behind him and strike without being hit, so I changed the frequency of thrown knives from 2 seconds to 2.5 seconds
– The door to Emily is loaded both in the second-to-last checkpoint, and the last checkpoint, but was only deleted from the last checkpoint after you kill the boss, meaning that you could never get to Emily.  I added an if statement to only add a door there if there wasn’t already one from the previous checkpoint.
– Whenever you exit the pause menu, it reenables player movement.  If you use the menu during a time when you’re not supposed to be moving, it reenables it anyways, so I made it instead restore the ability to move back to what it was when the menu was brought up.

I’m done saying “I’ve fixed all the bugs.”  I’m pretty sure that there’s simply no such thing as bug-free.  Even if you think about some of the AAA game titles out there, I’m sure you can come up with bugs and glitches that you’ve seen, and they have thousands of people playtesting and adjusting code.  I’m toying with the idea of putting this up on reddit, or Steam Greenlight Concepts just to try and get more people to play around with it.  I don’t like the idea of doing that while still relying so heavily on Braid, Samurai Jack, and Street Fighter, though, so I guess I just need to wait it out.
Anyhow, I’m still counting on you guys to play through and give feedback.  What parts are too hard, what parts are too easy?  What isn’t obvious enough, what sorts of changes do you want?  If you have the ability to record yourself playing, that’d be extremely useful.  I’ll take whatever I can get, guys.