Hey there! Version 1.0.3 of Metal Garden is now finally live, and this one is pretty massive. The previous patches were mainly quick fixes and balancing adjustments, but this one fixes virtually every bug I was made aware of since launch of the game, and also adds a few new surprises. This is also the version that will almost certainly launch on Steam on Friday.
I really wanna thank everyone who reported the bugs, this version would be so much more difficult to put together without you :)

VERSION 1.0.3 changes:

Bigger changes:

- Redid the two large water areas in chapters 2 and 5. There are some visual improvements (especially in chapter 5), the areas are bound with geometry much better and invisible walls have been removed.

- The water animals in chapters 2 and 5 are now much less agressive (as they no longer have to act as map boundary guardians) and can be defeated.

- Weapons can now be switched with a mouse wheel.

- Added signal lights to moving platforms in puzzle sections to make them more easily identifiable from a distance.

- Limited ability to double jump while swimming (there are no larger swimming secions that would justify this, and it can otherwise be used to accidentally break out of bounds).

- The land animals that were present in the background in chapter 5 can now also be found in the play area of chapter 4. They have a bit more behavior code and animations now.

- Checkpoints/autosaves now only trigger the first time you enter a new chapter.
Reason for this: since autosaves in the game don't save defeated enemies and picked up items, players retriggering checkpoints and then restarting from them would occasionally lock themselves into an unsalvagable save.

- It's not visible from Itch.io, but this version also added full support for Steam Clouds and Steam Achievements for the Steam release on 21st March.

Smaller changes and bug fixes:

- Fixed a bug where, if you exited the ladder and then quickly double jumped, you'd get infinite jumps.
The issue was that the game has a small jump tolerance (about 0.2 seconds) where if you exit a platform and jump it won't count towards your double jump, but will merely register it as a regular jump. But doing the same thing while exiting the ladder skipped the check and just let you jump indefinitely.

- Fixed a bug where exiting, then very quickly entering ladder would allow you to keep firing your weapon while on the ladder.
This was due to each ladder having a short 'timeout' to let you more smoothly exit them, but re-entering the ladder during the timeout would let you keep your weapon out. I fixed this by removing the timeout and adding another piece of collision to each ladder in the game that handles smoother exiting.

- Fixed a bug where all movement on ladders would occasionally become horribly slow.
The issue was happening when you would go on a ladder after swimming at some point. Both swimming and climbing a ladder are tagged as 'flying' under the hood, but entering the ladder wasn't correctly switching 'flying' speed. So you would end up climbing the ladder at the speed of swimming.

- Made sound effects for the heating generator platforms in puzzle sections loop.

- Fixed a bug in first puzzle section in chapter 2, where the door would stay up if the heating generator platform was quickly disconnected after being connected.

- In the same puzzle section, made it so you can't get stuck in the left alcove of the room by calling the platform to move and then sprinting into the alcove. The platform's deadzone has been increased so it will now stop before you become entombed.

- Fixed a bug where if you interact with a door that requires a key while it's opening, the "Door requires a key" message wouldn't go away until taking damage.

- Fixed various typos across the menus. Changed description of difficulty a bit to better reflect what each is like.

- Renamed the two dam armory keys that can be found in chapter 4 so their use is a bit more obvious.

- Updated the chapter select menu to more accurately reflect chapter amount (used to show empty space for two more chapters - this was a leftover from earlier UI design when I didn't know how many chapters the game would be broken into).

- Edited triggers for the final boss, so that it now doesn't spawn while player is behind rocks and unable to see it's entrance.

- Fixed a bug where swimming on the surface of water would ocassionally disable swimming (the problem was due to moving between different water box collisions, which would sometimes skip a check and conclude that, because player left one water collision for another, they had left water entirely).

- Improved entering/exiting water at steeper slopes.
If you previously tried to enter water at a steep slope you'd get really glitchy movement because the game was handling entering and exiting with only one trace. Now it's been expanded to two traces, which makes the transition a lot smoother.

- Fixed a bug where trying to fire the shotgun during reload animation before any round was chambered would play cancel reload animation. The behavior has been fixed so that it matches that of other weapons: pressing fire before a single round is chambered will do nothing, and after at least one has been chambered it will immediately transition into a firing animation.

- Pressing Reload key during reload will no longer stop reload - the reason is that it's very easy to do this midbattle and cancel a reload when you didn't mean to.

- If you spook the water animal hanging out on the cliffs in chapter 2, it will no longer just wander off into the depths, but actually start patrolling the water area near it.

- Improved jumping navigation for enemies in the arena fight of chapter 5.

- Fixed a bug where if you reloaded a checkpoint where sniper rifle had 0 bullets remaining, the sight and ammo counter would still be blue-colored instead of red-colored.

- Slightly lowered down the volume of music that plays during fights in chapter 5.

Thanks again to everyone who reported the bugs!

~ alexandra