Hi everyone!

2024 is coming to a close, and with it the Metroidvania Month Jam 26th edition as well. Lost Paradise got the second place of the contest, which is one more than its predecessor Silent Paradise did last year, so I'm pretty happy about that!

I was anxiously awaiting the end of this voting period, not because of the ranking, but because the 1.0 version of Lost Paradise had a few problematic bugs. But now the contest is over and the uploads have been  unlocked, so here's version 1.0.1 to the rescue!

What changed?

• The most glaring issue was a bug impacting your talismans: you could not unequip any talisman equipped before saving and quitting the game. That's pretty bad! The whole point of talismans is to give players some choice about how they character work, which in my opinion is the biggest idea Castlevania brought to the Metroid formula. So not being able to change your load-out completely defeats the purpose of this feature. Thankfully it's very possible to finish Lost Paradise in one sitting and never notice the bug, but that issue still impacted many players. I'm relieved to say it's now fixed!
• Another issue was a crash if you cancelled out of a Yes/No choice. Saying Yes was fine, saying No was also fine, but pressing Escape or B? Crash. It happened at two moments in the game: when you choose whether or not to enlist the help of the Discriminator and when you choose to trigger the ending. This issue was made way worse by the next one:
• The game didn't write the save file on the disk when you rested at benches. It did so when you exited through normal means (going back to the title screen or closing the window with [x] or Alt-F4), but if the game crashed...? No save to reload! That's been fixed as well: now every time you use a save point, the file is written on your disk, so you won't lose as much progress if another crash were to happen.
• I also fixed a bug in input remapping. Before, pressing the cancel button when trying to remap an action would cancel and leave the menu. Sounds reasonable, right? But what if you wanted to use that button for something? I mean, B is both "cancel" in menus and "dash" during the action, so it should definitely be possible to reassign this button. And now it is.
• While I was at it, I added the possibility to remap the "Toggle map" action.

There are definitely more issues that I'm aware of, so big thanks to all the jam participants who tried it out and gave me detailed feedback, as well as regular players! Once the holidays are over, I will be back to it to improve the game further and fix more bugs.

In the meantime, I wish you all a happy new year! ;)