Ender Story 2 has been making strides in progress lately so it's time for another preview. There are also some small new features that will make a big difference in the experience of the game.

Area Previews

A new town! This town, Ominan, marks the first of many desert-themed areas as Erion travels across a desert. At first, you might find that this is not an important town, but there's a powerful secret to be found in here!



A new deadly cave that already has a lot of victims :P.

Engine changes

1. You probably noticed that new box outline in the new screenshots which is showing which tile the player is placing their mouse over. This was added to show that you can now click on a tile to automatically walk towards it! Now, it's possible to play Ender Story with only the mouse - instead of having to constantly switch between keyboard & mouse.

2. In ES1, the game would lag when opening any sort of object - bookshelves, chests, barrels, or skeletons. This is because the game was saving this interaction to the hard drive in order to update the player's inventory. Now, the game has been adjusted to save only in-between different screens, so there will be no lag in opening objects anymore, making for a smoother experience.

3. The third significant change is the addition of an input buffer. This is something heavily used in fighting games, but I had not realized that it was something useful to add to all types of games. Thanks to playing some Super Smash Bros. Melee, the idea came to me to add this in.

So what is an input buffer? In ES1, you might notice that trying to move Erion with the keyboard controls is a bit difficult - he won't respond to changes in directions that well. To be precise, it's coded so that it ignores input until he's done walking. So the player has to wait for him to take a step, and then press a new direction key. This makes his movement very stuttered, and hard for the player to control. Players will often press the direction key right before Erion actually stops walking, causing him to stand still, unresponsive.

So an input buffer simply holds the input that a player pressed while Erion is moving, and then waits for the first possible moment where Erion is out of his walking animation, and then reads the input. This makes it easy for the player to execute frame perfect movements (more fighting game lingo :P), and overall it makes it more natural to control Erion now.

If you're a game-dev, the take away is:
- Only save the game in between screens/levels, or at save points - these are places where the player expects the game to pause and won't be surprised if there's lag.

- If the controls of your game are unresponsive, you should look into adding an input buffer.

Bloopers

Here are some bugs that I came across while developing the ES2.

I walked inside a house... and was put into a wall.

Something's up with that barrel?

End

Hope you enjoyed the teasers & insights to changes in ES2! Since I am programmer, you can expect more bugs/programming related stuff from me rather than the content of the game. I'll still be doing some area previews, since it's fun to add teasers. 'Till next time!