He does not climb you every time any more
A small correction to v1.5.18, and it is the difference between a character and a cutscene.
VAPOR SHAGGY shipped yesterday doing exactly one thing: turn up, run in, jump onto Squachy's head, say something unkind, drop off, leave. It is a good bit. It was also the only bit, and by the third viewing you are not watching a heckler any more, you are watching an animation play.
So most visits are now just the heckle. He walks on, stops beside Squachy, says his piece and carries on out the other side. One visit in four he still bothers with the climb, which is what makes the climb worth seeing when it happens. Nothing about the jump itself changed — it is the same single parabola, paused at the apex, coming down under the gravity it went up with.
Two things had to move for the ground version to be worth watching
His quip only existed while he was perched, so the new phase draws it too — above his head rather than beside him. On the crown he is already as high as the screen goes, so a bubble over his head lands behind the corner buttons and level with him is the only safe place. On the floor it is exactly the opposite: level runs the bubble straight through the ACTIVE DETECTIONS headline, which is drawn afterwards and would paint over the line he came to say.
And he now draws in front of that headline rather than behind it. The ground on this screen is the same handful of rows the headline occupies, so at the old ordering he stood there for three full seconds with his legs behind the text. Squachy deliberately stays behind it and still does — he is 130 pixels of opaque brown and the text has to survive him — but the pet is thirty pixels wide and moving, so passing in front reads as depth rather than as an obstruction.
The actually-useful part
- Changed: the pet only climbs onto Squachy on about one visit in four; the rest he heckles from the ground
- Changed: his quip now appears on ground visits too, above his head instead of beside him
- Fixed: on the ground he was drawn behind the ACTIVE DETECTIONS headline, which hid most of him while he was talking