it's bug quest!!!!!

i would always think about this game once every few months so it is genuinely SUCH A JOY to have finally found a few of the files for it... even if the files are older than i'd like!! any future "devlogs" will just highlight additions and changes, but in this first one i will go on for longer to talk about "other things".

here are some things we lost:

• some NPCs in the danger zone. the only one i remember was a kamen rider reference, so i managed to recreate it. scorpion dance is the only npc that survived the ages. straight up that area only had 1 npc in it for the entire time i was making the normal ending achievable.
• nighttime danger, nighttime bee, & nighttime rainy maps. nighttime sunny & cloudy still exist, but can't be accessed without the others.
• NPCs in the nighttime zones. two still exist in sunny nighttime, but there were at least 4 more that were lost and the entire cloudy nighttime map has been wiped. this is so sad.
• possibly some worms? my worm numbers skipped from 4 to 7 so i'm not sure what happened to 5 and 6... one of them has been remade into the danger zone worm and the other will go in a nighttime area.
• "the attic" (aka where the spider ending is gotten) was a mostly completed room. i just had to make the spider queen sprite. aside from the color palette, it's all gone. :(
• possibly the snail party? i have a room for it but it's empty, so i think i must have started filling it in at some point.
• the final puzzle! i wrote this on a sign in-game but i had this whole arrow maze planned out. losing this might have been for the best honestly. i almost just deleted the room so that the last straightaway would take you to the branching path between the ending and the worm house, but i think it's funny to leave it there as a relic of the past. i might throw something else in there in a future update.
• as a result of the above, i believe the butterfly ending was lost too. there was a secret exit in the arrow maze that would have taken you to behind the fences in the nighttime sunny area, and you would be able to find a butterfly back there and get that ending. the ending will still be there, but there's going to be a different way to get there...

now here are the things that were changed or added after i found the file!:

• fences added to the light zone maze because i kept getting lost and having THE ENTIRE PERIMETER OF THE SCREEN be exits was a pain to tweak. i also added room numbers so i better remembered what room in the sequence i was working on lol.
• made all danger zone npcs except the scorpion
• finished the snail dialogue. only the first 10 dialogue boxes had been written and i had a placeholder to remind myself that i wanted to write 100 of them. 
• readded the pit transition room between the bee area and the bee dungeon. honestly shocked to learn that this was lost. i guess i came up with it way later?
• made the worm house. iirc the original ending idea was that you were going to talk to the worm who was standing on the cliff after collecting all 9 worms and it would just transition you to the Worm Ending screen. but now they have a nice house. :)
• fixed a few instances of a single word of dialogue getting its own box. i hope to fix every instance of this eventually. i also made a few other tiny dialogue tweaks, but almost all dialogue is untouched from the original 2018 build.
• added some animated text! i don't think this was a feature when i first made this game! (or if it was, i don't think there were buttons for it)
• spider softlocks you. the bitsy build when i made the game did not let sprites/dialogue send you into an exit state, so in my excitement to see that was a feature now, i added that and made sure you were stuck there forever. :) (edit: turns out the sidequest isn't even doable because the first spider in the questline got deleted! oops! there's no softlock after all)
• desaturated some of the colours to be less eye-searing.
• readded the hat to the player avatar. i dont know why i removed it.

i'm so happy to finally see this game again! and i'm honestly still impressed by a lot of the spritework lol. i genuinely think the cityscape is sooo pretty and i'm so glad that one wasn't lost. anyways here are the Priority Tasks for the next update:

• fix the screen loop in the danger zone. this was actually one of the first things i fixed when i found the file but i accidentally refreshed the page and it was undone lol... i must have forgotten to redo it and only ended up catching it on my final test. didn't seem significant enough to do immediately.
• continue tweaking the colour palettes. some of them still feel too bright. the sewers are too dark. the spider zone bothers me that you can't tell the spiders/player from the webs but if i try to change it then it will reveal how to navigate the maze, so idk about that one.
• fix more dialogue boxes. make them shorter and smaller.
• finish spider ending: i feel like this one requires the most work buuuut the fact that you get softlocked if you try to do it right now makes it kind of important LOL. it's also the first ending you can technically get so i feel like it should be accessible.
• more NPCs in barren areas. danger zone is pretty empty. instead of focusing on it though i'll probably just make sure to add one or two NPCs to old areas per update. keeps the game fresh. :)
• butterfly, worm, and snail will be in future updates. :) these all require the nighttime maps to be completely finished so they'll probably be done in close succession.

some things i'm thinking of doing that aren't really priority:

• alternate normal endings: it would be funny. i've got 3 in mind (one would be tweaking the current ending) and it wouldn't take much work.
• adding music: i don't know how to make music myself (yet) but there are Gamer Songs i think of when i go through certain areas. so since adding music to bitsy games is a Thing now, i might make some sick tunes to Fit The Vibes. eventually.

ANYWAYS. thanks for playing my game! i hope it was fun and that you're looking forward to any potential future updates. :)