0.6.28 Update: New shadow engine, updated visuals and more

Hi everyone! You thought this project died? Not this time~

My life has stabilized enough so that I can relax on the weekends without going through existential fear (for this month, anyway). So, as soon as I could, I started updating the game with fresh mindset.

Scroll down for screenshots and GIFs!

New

• Complete rewrite of the shader engine! Well, nothing too fancy, but now it supports global hue blending, animated lightmasks and colored shadows. As a result, levels look better now (and I gotta update the main page with new screenshots someday)
  
• Levels have their own hue blend value, which affects all render: shadows, tiles, decor, characters and even some GUI. The graphics look more cohesive in exploration mode now
• Support for animated lightsource for all that twinkling and flickering lighting. Currently implemented on Haruna's magic torch, but I'll add more in the future
• Added a bunch of new shadowmasks for tiles and logic for them. Every shadow related to tiles should be smooth and round now, without any blocky parts. Needless to say how much smoother the dungeon layout looks now!
• Settings menu! It's a work in progress, but there are dedicated sliders for SFX, voices and music. More settings are planned to come!
• Completely new Cavern level background with three layers of parallax. It's not set in stone, but looks much better than whatever used to be before it
• Added a lightly bobbing camera in battle mode to promote some dynamicity. I'll add more camera effects later, and I'll also add some settings to toggle them on / off for the folks prone to motion sickness

The rest of the changes are under screenshot section!

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New parallax Cavern background

I'm not yet sure how seasick this effect makes people, so this may or may not get removed in the future. But I like it now!

New hue blending. Depending on your monitor, the differences may look minor, but trust me, it does make a lot of difference in the end!

More comparisons. I looked on my PC and the difference is huge, but on mobile it appears weak. Your mileage might vary

I really like how s m o o t h the shadows look around the stairs now

SFX / Music / Voice settings work now, but aren't saved between sessions. That'll probably get sorted out in the next updates

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Changes

• I locked out the Russian localization. The reason is: it's very outdated, and apparently, a lot of CGs got broken because of incorrect tags. I'll get it back working again once the translation will be done

Bug/balance

• I finally fixed the flashing black stripes graphical bug! Turns out, it was due to subpixel rounding error in some cases. I fixed the rendering and it shouldn't happen now.
• Fixed the flipping level background in some positions. And again, it was due to a rounding error!

Miscellaneous

• Various small fixes. Really, these are kinda boring to write about!
• Some minor text edits, especially for the last chapters
• Some minor level layout changes, mainly to accommodate the new shadow engine