Hungry Critters Public Update 1.3.0.0b

I've waited too long to update the public version, so quite a few improvements have been made in the interim. Here we go:

Play as Geier

You can now choose to play as Geier the wolf from the title screen and have full control over all his attacks and animations.

Pause Menu

A menu has been added to the pause screen with several options, many of them new.

Reset

Originally disabled in this version, a fix for it has been backported. This option will instantly reset the characters to their starting positions and states.

Graphics

Several options to change graphics setting have been added for those who want less demand or more fidelity from their computer. Until now, I've been aiming to make the graphics balanced between the two extremes, but with this, I can now push some things to their upper limit. These settings are not currently remembered, but will soon be saved to your browser.

Presets

This will let you change several graphics options at once with settings for Maximum, Balanced, and Minimum. I'd like to allow HC to run on nearly everything, and I hope the lower settings will be a step towards facilitating that.

Shadow Quality

This will let you change the amount of shadow detail in the scene, also allowing you to turn them off entirely.

FPS

This will allow you to choose from the following options for frames per second: 15, 30, 60, 90, and 120. Things get a little wobbly at 15 FPS, but appear to still work. I'll have to put  more work in to ensure the game runs truly FPS-independent. Frame rates above 60 will remain a subscriber-only feature.

Content Settings

Settings for disabling undesired content are uniquely controlled by each character and displayed in the pause menu. Currently, you can disable digestion in order to give Lotti as much time as you want inside Geier or disable butt stuff for Geier to avoid his accidental AV attack and butt release.

Full Screen

The game can now be made full screen and its resolution will automatically adjust accordingly. While this is technically part of this release, this option will remain a subscriber-only feature.

Gamepad Support and Remapping

I originally starting adding this functionality so more VR devices would actually be able to play the game. I figured I might as well add standard gamepad support as well, and altogether this ended up being a whole can of worms. However, all standard and VR gamepads should now be usable with the game with the ability to rebind their inputs. As with VR headsets, I'm limited to the hardware I own for testing, but I feel I've come up with a fairly flexible system. There are still some bits that will need to be ironed out in the future.

With the ability to use gamepads for gameplay also comes the ability to use them for navigating the menus.

On-screen prompts currently only show your keyboard key bindings. Figuring out how to display buttons for gamepads is going to be a whole new problem in itself.

Your browser will remember your gamepad bindings, though for now, will not save your other settings, since they are in a state of high flux and keeping up with compatibility of previous versions would add a lot to my workload. Also, larger updates in the future will likely reset your gamepad bindings.

Virtual Reality

Patrons can play Hungry Critters in virtual reality by accessing its page in a VR-compatible browser on a VR device. The game will continue to be primarily playable without it and it will remain a secondary feature, as I know not everyone has a VR device and these people will not be able to access this feature. VR is currently only mostly-functional, but it is not currently a primary concern.

VR functionality is technically part of this release, but will remain a patron-only feature.

Compression

Characters and levels are now stored in distinct ZIP files, significantly reducing download size. This is also the first step taken towards eventually allowing others to make their own content for Hungry Critters.

Progress on the loading screen is now measured by a loading bar, which is not yet totally accurate and needs a bit more work.

NPC Struggling

A small thing, but when playing as Geier, Lotti now produces light struggles while in his belly. Needs more work, and ideas for some light mechanics have started to form.

Sound

Also small, sound now has more realistic fall-off over distance. Still needs some tweaking and is currently only mono, but I've got some good ideas for implementing directional sound.

Other Backported Fixes

The skybox was originally washed-out in this version, but has been fixed in this release.

Play Hungry Critters

Everyone can play this version here for free.

Predator tier subscribers can access the source files of the latest version from inside the game with their Patreon account.