Late-April Combat & More

Minor improvements and additions to the game have been made

• Fixed minor animation bugs for Aria on ledges.
• Fixed "fireflies" appearing on the surface of water.
• Reina only brakes when at a higher threshold of speed.
• Passively having an enchanted sword in Rixin's hand will steadily drain the magic from his earrings. If Rixin swings his sword with an enchantment active, it will increase the rate of draw from his earrings.
• If Rixin perfectly bats an enemy's attack away, he regains some lost magic. Dodging attacks regains more than parrying.
• If Rixin loses all magic, his enchantments will dissipate. No enchantments can be placed on weapons with zero magic.
• The Skeleton enemy's behavior was improved.

• Rixin, Aria and Skeletons will splash in shallow water.
• Fixed the custom bloom not being properly set between play sessions.
• Aria will gradually accelerate when climbing up ladders to an upper limit of ~33%.
• Rixin's earrings will glow when they are being used to enchant a weapon.
• Optimized the fire effect seen on Rixin and enemies.
• Optimized melee weapons to having fewer maximum collision results.
• Aria will no longer be stuck on Reina if Rixin dismounts while in proximity to something which catches Aria's curiosity.
• Optimized a variety of shared visual effects and behavioral patterns between game objects.
• Optimized User-Interface scaling.

• Rixin can be frozen solid.
• Rixin can dodge in directions based on player input more closely.
• Weapons can impart knockback forces in arbitrary directions.
• Rixin will bat away attacks from his right differently than from his left.
• Rixin can roll backwards.
• Rixin can be put into an inactionable state of knockback from heavy attacks.

From glossydon:

I'm dedicating most of my waking hours to game development. My daylight hours are mostly work-work, but during darker hours of the day I spend my spare time working on Ventury.
My predictions for being able to return as I was before were wrong, and it will take many more months until my schedule can be opened up to more hours per-day.
Even still, I've managed to accomplish a good deal of objectives with what little time I have to spend on the project. Perhaps it encourages me to pace myself better?

In unrelated news, I tested Ventury on a $100 mini PC and found myself wanting to optimize the game however I could. With some help from the Godot community, I was able to pick-apart problem children from the lot of scripts in Ventury that run per-frame. I went from ~20 FPS at 480p, to a very consistent 30 FPS at 540p, even in the most busy of areas in the project so far.
A really big help in increasing frame rates was reducing the amount of unnecessary next-pass materials, reducing material complexity, reducing shader complexity, implementing a number of frame busses for objects to execute pieces of code on staggered frames, and playing with a few settings for the physics server.
I am very happy with the results, though I partly wonder if some portions of the game's codebase could be ported to being pre-compiled C-Sharp or C++ to get any extra performance? It's too early to worry about that, but it is something I would entertain for the most math-heavy sections of the codebase.