[ETHER] Update 25/02/2017 - New features, new save system, gameplay fixes

Since the last update I've been working hard on the game and added a ton of new stuff that I hope testers will enjoy. A new build will be ready soon but meanwhile, here's a list of stuff that's been added and fixed so far.

The music tracks for areas 1 and 2 have been expanded upon and worked on further to add more variation and make the tracks longer.

There's now a dynamic camera system in place. Pushing up and down on the keyboard will now not only aim up and down while jumping, but also tilt the camera further up or down to allow the player to view more of the level above or below them. This is to prevent "leaps of faith" and allow the player to attack enemies above and below them more easily.

Some platforms can now be jumped through as well as leaped down from by pressing crouch and then letting go of the crouch key. I plan to get a system in place where you can hold crouch and press jump to do this (Contra style) but have had some problems working this out. This will come in a future update hopefully.

Testers will notice there have been new enemy placements in the early levels. This is to ramp up the difficulty a bit and make them more challenging. Also, in the previous build, enemies would stay dead but now they respawn when you re-enter the level, to allow a bit of creds farming as well as continous action.

This brings me on to the subject of the revamped save system. Earlier the game would use Game Maker's built in save function as well as having persistent rooms. This has been scrapped in favour of a custom save system that gives me more control over the game and prevents a lot of nasty bugs that arose from using the built in save system. I remember distinctly that for every new update, players had to overwrite their old save files because they would be corrupted. This should not happen anymore as the game now uses far more reliable save files that should be more futureproof.

I've also added a proper pause function to the game and the pause menu now brings you back to the main menu if you quit from the game, instead of quitting the entire game.

There have also been a ton of minor bug fixes to the game, so the game now overall feels a lot more polished compared to the previous build.

A new build should be available fairly soon. I'm mainly going to focus my work on the new area of the game now.