v0.3.0 - You gotta eat your veggies first

I spent time this update doing  bugfixes and polish items. For the past several weeks I've been refactoring how the game manages shared data. You can now navigate back and forth from the game screen to the menu screen with no bugs. This behavior might sound easy but in practice  it can be a pain in the ass. I've been dreading it since I started working on this prototype five years ago, the scope of my game has balooned since then. IMO the amount of bookkeeping bugs you run into is directly proportional to how complicated your game's underlying systems are. The changes I made to help reduce bugs seemed to also improve performance.  Though these changes were fun, it was really painful to finalize them this update. I'm hoping future refactors are a little smoother. 

It's not all proverbial veggies in this gamedev meal of an update. I did get to have a little fun doing some visual prototyping for enemies in the game (See the title image). I consider myself a programmer so playing around with the visual side of things is a new, interesting problem space for me. The model in the post image is not quite game ready yet. In addition to the mesh of the enemy model, I want to take the visual style of that 3d model and apply it to the entire game. (I'm hoping the game isn't completely incomprehensible with that change).

I'm happy the game is in a far better place than it was two months ago. I can't rest on my laurels though. I want to keep refining the existing experience until all aspects of the game agree in humming thematic unity.  I want to keep hitting at bugs as I find them, creating a more coherent visual style, making AI more interesting to fight against and maybe even get back to multiplayer when it makes sense. 

Thanks for keeping up with the game, I hope I have more to show next update. ⭐💥