After putting the first Blubbits demo online, I received a lot of useful feedback. I reworked several game features based on that feedback. Here is a short list of things that were implemented in the new version (which is currently online).

Camera improvements

The initial camera was simply attached to a springarm which moved it closer to the player each time an obstacle appeared between the player and the camera. Rotation of the camera was triggered by right joystick or mouse movement. Demo feedback indicated that (i) the springarm generated strange camera behaviour in certain situations and (ii) rotation was too fast or not fast enough depending on the PC.

The new camera collision behaviour is now hardcoded and different: when the camera collides with something, it goes up and tests whether the obstacle is still there using raycasts. Once the obstacle is gone, it goes down again. The camera rotation has a different smoothing (interpolation) factor depending on whether the player uses a joystick or the mouse: linear for the joystick and exponential for the mouse.

(sorry for the GIF compression - Itch only allows 3 MB)

Options

Demo feedback asked for options concerning camera controls and also for the remapping of keyboard controls. This is typical of having to deal with many configurations: European keyboards vs US keyboards, slow / fast PCs, etc.

I implemented several options: a speed factor for the camera's rotation, fullscreen vs window, an automatic mode where the camera is controlled automatically by the game and simply follows the player and an option to remap the keyboard input.

Hats!

Several comments I received said that the NPC blubbits in the game were all the same and that it would be nice if they could have different features. I thought that this is actually a good idea to reinforce the narrative of the game. 

The issue with the blubbits characters is that the way they were designed does not allow for a lot of variations. I came to the conclusion that the best way of creating differences is to give them ... hats! Below is the result:

Other stuff and next steps

There are lots of other little things I added here and there, in order to get that demo polished. The good thing with Godot Engine is that all these little things will be easy to expand to the whole project. The next step is now precisely to implement the new elements used for the demo publication (including a completely revised dialog system) into to the two levels that are currently halfway ready. This will be cumbersome and not so exciting, but it needs to be done.