Thanks! I've been fleshing it out as I go rather than going in passes. I'm unsure how this is for productivity, but it seems to be working for me!
I just put up another video devlog, focusing on a bit of what I talked about in my last post, as well as a couple of new features. I'm in a bit of an annoying part of development for talking about the game, because it being a metroidvania, I don't want to show too much! The biggest new things I *can* talk about are my new particle system, with cool wind, and my control remapper. The video's linked below, but I'll also go over it a bit in text.
The control remapper was something I really wanted to do, I'm rather big into game accessibility and allowing remapping I think is one of the most basic, most essential parts. I allow remapping of keyboard and gamepad controls separately, and allow both to be used interchangeably in game. I also use the mapping to generate button hints on interactable and when you pick up objects, based on which input type you've used last. A lot of this might not be noticed by the player, but that's really the point. I want to provide a smooth experience for somebody just picking up the game.

The new particles I've added are fairly simple, but I think therein lies their strength. I made a really simple way to create a bunch of single pixel particles, with fairly simple behaviors, that can be affected by "wind". The first usecase I had for these was adding dust to each of the rooms, as shown below. I just spawn a bunch in the room, and they all choose random velocities and trajectories, fading in and out. The player also "kicks some up" from the floor when walking by. The idea with this was to communicate that the castle has been rather empty, unused, and not taken care of for a while.

The wind is a bit more interesting. I basically allow things to register wind zones with the particle system, and these wind zone's velocity field is defined by these two functions.
v_x = (2 - y * y) * (1 - r / r_max)
v_y = x * y * (1 - r / r_max)
The last bit in each is just a radial falloff, to about 3 units out (the height of the player, ish). These functions probably seem a bit random, but the idea was to have a speed falloff above and below the thing that's moving, and to have a bit of circulation behind them. These just happened to provide it, after player around graphing them. Here's a screencap from the editor showing my debug view for it.

Probably a little higher effort than it needed to be, but at least it was fun!
Along with all of this, as I've said, I've been pecking away on content. I've got a bunch of new rooms finished, another miniboss, some special art for an area, and a bit more... I finally counted the number of "room cells" I've finished vs the number I've yet to finish, based on that I'm about 30% of the way along. Same as I estimated! I think in reality I might be a bit further, primarily because I don't have any more systems that need to be created, and I have a lot of the elements and enemies that will continue to be reused already done. Now I'm mostly on the content train, which takes a while in itself, but y'know, 30% along that(ish).
Anyway, that's about all I've got for now. Next time I'll be doing a small rework to the combat in the game, and trying to figure out how to talk about content development without spoiling too much.
