Winter 2026 Updates

We have a lot to share in this season’s update, from events and presentations to major gameplay features, new areas, performance improvements, and plenty of bug fixes. The past couple of months have been busy in the best way, and we are excited to share what we have been working on.

Def Com X

We attended Def Com X in November, and we had a great time meeting everyone who stopped by our booth. It was wonderful to talk with so many players, hear your thoughts, and share what we have been building. Thank you to everyone who came out to support us. We are already looking forward to being back again next year.

Cedarville University

We also had the opportunity to give a presentation at Cedarville University as part of their Alumni Indie Video Game Developers event. Dan spoke on the importance of proper tooling in game development and software development as a whole, and how the right tools will exponentially increase productivity over time.

Thank you to everyone who attended and contributed to a great conversation. We are planning to upload the presentation to our YouTube channel soon for those who were not able to attend in person.

Updates and Upgrades

Armor

The armor in Violet just got an upgrade! Armor now adds a new layer of strategy to both exploration and combat, allowing you to customize how you might approach different challenges.

It can also add additional stats, interact with stamina, and provide protection from environmental hazards like extreme heat and cold. Some armor allows you to pick up enemies or interact with the world in entirely new ways.

Armor follows the same merging philosophy as weapons. While there may appear to be around 15 armor types at first glance, each one can be merged into higher rankings. This means there are actually 60 armor variations to discover throughout the game.

1. Leg armor that allows withstanding more hits before being stunned.
2. Ear armor that gives better tolerance to heat and reduces damage from fire.
3. Waist armor that allows consumables to increase in effect.
4. Arm armor that allows you to lift heavier objects.
   
5. Neck armor that increases stealth against vision and hearing.
6. Foot armor that allows faster movement in slower terrain.
   
7. Wearable armor that let’s you see health bars and other statistics not normally available.
8. Wearable armor that increases luck in your favor.
9. Finger armor that increases durability on weapons during use.
10. Ear armor that gives better tolerance to cold and reduces damage from ice.
    

    

11. Chest armor that reduces damage taken.
12. Thigh armor that allows faster movement when attacking and defending.
13. Wearable armor that allows for better bartering.

The Forge Brothers

We also addressed a visual issue that could occur when moving quickly between areas. “Pop in” could be seen, or even a black void, while the next section loaded. To resolve this, we introduced the Forge Brothers, who briefly appear to interrupt movement until the area is ready. While we are continuing to design the world so most transitions load seamlessly, this ensures that fast movement is handled gracefully when it does happen.

Enemy Behavior

Another quality of life improvement focuses on enemy behavior. Enemies will no longer attack dormant Violets. This change not only makes gameplay feel fairer, but it also ties in with the lore.

Asteric Redesign

We also wanted to share a quick update on the ongoing redesign of Asteric. We have completed new animations for his running, walking, dashing, dodging, and balanced weapon swings, along with improvements to his violet animation. This redesign was driven by community feedback, and we finally feel like he’s more fitting for the role of the game’s hero.

New Areas

Northern & Southern Mountains

We have also made significant progress on new environments, starting with the Southern Mountain region. This area features a river running through its center, dividing the map into two distinct sides. Falling rocks from the northern mountains constantly crash down, posing a threat to both Asteric and enemies. You’ll have to keep an eye out for falling boulders while navigating this region!

Northern Mountain Foothills

Work has also begun on the Northern Mountain foothills. While this area is not as snowy as higher elevations, it is still extremely dangerous. Asteric will continue to take cold damage unless he has proper protection. Armor choices are especially important here.

Music

On the audio side, we added updated music tracks for the Southern Mountain, including day, night, and enemy variations. These tracks were originally composed years ago by Dan and recently remixed by Eugene.

Southern Mountain Day:

Southern Mountain Night:

Southern Mountain Enemy:

New Enemy

We have a new enemy to introduce: Rock Squirrels. These guys may look harmless at first, but when damaged or stunned, they harden into rocky shells that make them temporarily invulnerable. You may need to get creative to deal with them effectively. (Though maybe a bomb could blow them up?)

Garbage Collection

Behind the scenes, a huge amount of work went into performance and garbage collection improvements. Game Maker automatically handles garbage collection, but with our interconnected world and dynamic loading systems, this process became increasingly slow. To address this, we rewrote large portions of our systems to reduce unnecessary memory allocation.

We introduced a resource pool to reuse arrays and structs instead of constantly allocating new memory. We also centralized function declarations so that only one copy of each function exists, rather than duplicating them across thousands of instances. Inline functions and callbacks were refactored into this system as well, and temporary arrays were moved to a global structure to further reduce overhead. While these changes introduced a few unexpected bugs along the way, we have been steadily squashing them. Our goal is to get this game to run on a potato!

Optimizations

Additional optimizations include preventing the loader from triggering during battles and adding an adaptive FPS option. This new graphics mode allows the game to dynamically switch between 60 FPS and 30 FPS drawing modes when performance slows down, making gameplay smoother on lower-end hardware.

Bug Fixes

• We fixed an issue where items placed under rocks or boulders could still be picked up before being uncovered. These items now correctly require the obstacle to be removed first.

  

• Items and resources that became stuck inside walls can now be properly picked up. This resolves several frustrating edge cases during exploration.
• We fixed a visual issue where falling debris in the miniboss room was not appearing correctly. This was caused by how our manageActivation system handled visibility.

  

• We resolved waterManager crashes that could occur when warping between areas. The system now correctly removes the active water state before transitioning.

  

• Several mini games were fixed after recent refactors introduced visual bugs. This includes invisible prizes in the Monty Treasure Chest game, missing bows and arrows in the archery game, and clearer messaging when the inventory is full and arrows cannot be added.
• Auto merge behavior has been corrected when using the bow while another item was equipped behind the scenes. We also increased its priority so auto merge can occur properly during combat.

  

• With the addition of picking up enemies, we added proper falling sprites for Violets and other enemies. This ensures animations behave correctly when enemies are dropped or fall from heights.

  

• We addressed a wide range of miscellaneous bugs across the game. These include visual glitches with stone pillars, tree shadows, water worms, as well as issues with enemy navigation on bridges, ore drops, targeting behavior, NPC interactions, and enemy spawning.

  

Game Maker v2024.14 Updates

We updated the project to Game Maker version 2024.14 and resolved a few controller-related issues introduced by the update. Most changes were straightforward, with only minor adjustments required.

Game Maker added built-in array_shift and array_shuffle functions, which conflicted with our existing implementations. We removed our custom array_shift and renamed our original shuffle function to avoid naming collisions, and reported the issue to Game Maker for visibility.

Playback Inputs

We fixed several issues with Playback Inputs to ensure the correct save file is used for each session. Buffer handling during slow playback has also been improved for more accurate input reproduction.

Playback Inputs now function correctly when restarting the game. Previously, restarting would incorrectly create a separate session, which has now been resolved.

Marketing Updates

Finally, on the marketing side, our refreshed logo and branding are still in progress. This update took longer than expected, but we are hopeful it will be ready to share soon.

Conclusion

Thank you, as always, for following along and supporting the project. Dan is now working two days a week at his contracting job and is also learning how to use Angular, so progress has slowed somewhat, but we’re still working hard every spare second!

– The Violet Team