The truth is, I've touched on virtually every aspect of the game. Art, programming, gameplay, sound (to a small extent), interface, and everything in between.
First up for discussion/preview, is the least important of the above; the art.
I've always been proud of the art in Murder Mansion (especially after I finally replaced the original black-and-gray placeholder player icons), but there's always room for improvement, so a portion of my update work has been spent giving it a little facelift. I noticed a couple of glaring problems that I (hopefully) have corrected. One is that many of the icons in the game looked very much like plastic. Second of which is that some colors were way off (I don't know if I had a bad monitor when I originally drew the icons but, for instance, the wood all had a sort of purple tone to it...)
So I've gone through the art, almost icon-by-icon, and tweaked everything.
Much of this was accomplished through the application of some quick-n-dirty texturing by overlaying a semi-transparent pattern over the existing icon (for instance, I made a woodgrain transparency, then plastered it over almost every wood surface in the game)
Of course, I did a lot of other, more hands-on, pixel-by-pixel graphical editing while I was at it.
But anyway, I'll pepper in some screenshots now...
A shot of the new title screen. Nothing fancy here. Just some added "stone" texture to the background, some of the flickering "attic" lights around the edge to give it that little extra something, improvements to some HUD buttons (I'm not sure how I ended up with a brownish color instead of dark red, but that's fixed!)
Also note that I've even made some improvements to the text output. I'll probably discuss those later, but it mostly involves changing some font sizes to make certain output stand out, adding better colors, etc.
And here we are in the front room of the Mansion. Here you can see what I mentioned above. The wood is no longer purple-ish, and it has a woodgrain texture. I believe I had already added the carpeting texture in the currently released version, so that might not be new. But I've also added a very faint texturing to the walls, corrected the bearskin rug colors, and given doors and windows the same lighting gradiant that the walls have always had.
Regular players will recall the screenshot that has been on the MM main page for years, of a murder scene in the kitchen. Well, the above screenshot shows a before and after of that area. I *just* took the before shot in the image above from the currently released version (I just ran the game briefly from the hub page to get that shot)
To the right, we have the After shot. Immediately noticeable, of course, is that I've increased the view by 4 tiles. But this comparison also shows off the improvements to surface textures and colors (especially the horrid furniture...)
Also note the liquids on the floor. The blood has been tweaked a little, but the water has been tweaked a lot. There's something else special about these two substances, but it falls under another topic for another day... :)
Last thing about this image is that the players now have a shadow! I added a 32-pixel-diameter circular shadow under the players, to make them stand out, and to offer a larger target to click on.
And a few more for the road. You may recognize the first one as the one I posted a few days ago. The second is just a shot of a casual stroll across the balcony that now lines the front of the Mansion (from the gold bedroom's second floor, over to the old balcony off of the game room). Hey look! Footprints are now directional, instead of generic dots! And the third, I'm currently getting beaten with a fire poker (hence the read "pain" screen fade; but that's been in the game for years now), but wait... That place sure doesn't look familiar...
