T'was a long break, but the team was finally reunited to glue together a build for PAX East. I'm getting ahead of myself though: First, let's discuss Admitted Students Day.

What a day that was. Crawling out of bed to see I'm already running late. It was a fun sort of terror, hearing Ferguson say, "You have five minutes before the high schoolers start pouring in. Get ready to rock and roll." In preparation for this storm of gamers™ with varying levels of skill, I had gotten a rudimentary version of a compass working.

It mostly directed the players where to go (in the tutorial level). Not that I was able to effectively mention that through the chaos. It certainly existed, though.

When they started rolling in the fun ensued. Surprisingly, these high schoolers were seemingly better than the average tester. It was like they played video games or something. Wild. Some of them were so caught up in Stray that they missed their respective shuttles. Overall, the reception was warm. It was nice seeing high school aged kids enjoying something I made; It's what I set out to do all those years ago when I applied to this school, after all.

Okay, back to PAX: We wanted our game to show off well, so we gathered the brain trust and made a slew of quality of life changes to get our game there.

The boy! He climbs!

I also got an actual arrow working for our compass, along with some other QOL, like fixing the playback of footstep sounds, making interactions use the "A" button, making objects not grapple-able by default, and making a backswing animation for attacks.