Hey, it's me (again)!

I recently revamped the tessellation method used by Eight Seasons. The stencil buffer clipping technique has been tossed out in favor of proper triangulation. The downside is that the initial loading times have increased. Oh well.

So without further ado, here are some screenshots:

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And here's a trailer thing I made for Greenlight (I haven't put it up yet, though...):

There's a little thing you'll need to keep in mind: when you load the game and access new menus/areas, batches of the games will be cached once to disk for later use. This process is a bit slow (the tessellation library I'm using is slow and I'm going to integrate another at a later time). So loading times for the first play through will be less than savory. Once it's done, though, the loading speeds are dramatically faster.

There's a battle system:

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I haven't implemented a help feature yet, but the basic idea is outlined here: http://commaexcess.com/articles/17/combat-in-eight-seasons

For a summary, mixing elements lead to different techniques:

• Winter is offensive. When placed in the head channel, Haiku launches an attack. Otherwise, it boosts offensive stats and effects.

• Spring is regeneration/enchantment. When placed in the head channel, it creates an enchantment. Further spring elements boost the healing.

• Summer is speed/enchantment. When placed at the head, it will create an enchantment, unless the entire technique is composed of summer. In this case, Haiku will run from the battle (see the Escape scroll).

• Autumn is defend when placed at the head and boost defensive stats when used during an enchantment.

Scrolls (the rune-like things on the left side of the screen) are specially formulated techniques. They provide a small boost over manually placing the elements, but limit creativity. Of course, since there's only two channels available at the beginning, there's not much creativity anyway .

Last but not least, the controls! They're simple: hold mouse on the left side to move left, right side to move left. Space bar is the action key (use it to search, open doors, whatever). ESC is the menu key (opens pause menu, but you can also just move the mouse to the top of the screen and click on the pause button). Lastly, F5 opens the diagnostics HUD, which shows the FPS (ignore the Lua memory bit, it's not too accurate as far as I can tell).

Here is a download: http://commaexcess.com/file_download/24/brightside05222013.zip

edit: The download link has been updated. Prior versions did not always play nice with audio format support on different PCs. This version should fix that.

I appreciate any feedback on the performance in-game (ignoring the slow loading screens). On my netbook with an Atom + ION combo I get upwards of 50 FPS (about a 2x to 3x increase over the previous rendering method!), and on my desktop with an i7 / nVidia GTX 560 Ti I get a solid 60 FPS (except during caching/loading sequences, of course). Funnily enough, when everything is cached, the netbook has lower loading times (it has an SSD though).

I haven't played it yet, but I intend to do so when I get a few quiet minutes. I certainly like the feel of the game, and it is nice to see to evolve over the months/years.
I hope you keep inspired despite the lack of feedback you deserve.

Thank you for your kind words! Any feedback motivates me more than I can describe.

On a side note, I would like to point out that I fixed a problem with audio formats crashing the game. On some computers that I have access to, it would crash whenever it tried to play an audio stream. That's fixed now, so if you downloaded it before, I would suggest trying the latest version. The original post has been updated with the new download.

It crashed after showing the loading screen

Paul Whoknows, I fixed that just now. The copy I uploaded was one revision behind. Can you try it again and report the results?

Cute. Looks very Hellenistic.