Hey fellow pinball flippers

Today's build is a compilation of changes from the last month that Rourke and I have been adding to the game. 

Most notably is the significant change to the play-by-play game feel introduced by having bumpers automatically respawn without you having to fall down. Too often it's just confusing to the player in the first place as to why they must fall down to reset the room anyway, so that fixes that problem. It also keeps the action ongoing, although I do feel it may be at the cost of offering the player a micro-break mid game even when you're doing well (because you can only use consumables when in the launch zone). Additionally, the player gets a small reward if they clear the whole table before any bumpers respawn. 

New content & various gameplay changes

• Added a new mid-tier combat room and several enemies (including mechanical and gelatinous variants).
• Item: Blackjack - a lucky trinket that sometimes pops coins out of enemies when you bump them. Uncommon
• Early weapons are a bit cheaper to pick up with the intention of getting early build online faster.
• Demo video preview support (for when the game idles during event display)
• Hero: Demolitionist -> invention focused, damages with bombs and starts with bump damage locked at 1
• The Cleric’s Sticky Fingers achievement is less grindy (now 5 chests in a run)
• Under the hood: standardised delta-time usage and improved bumper hit event plumbing for cleaner effect hooks (use by keys/chests logic) -> there still exist many areas that are unbound by delta time like lerps in various areas that will slowly be converted (whenever I come across them)
• Rusty Key is cheaper, making early chest gambles more accessible.
• Old Copper Coins cost nudged up slightly to balance early coin synergies.
• Crystalstorm Staff shrank its footprint (now 2×3) and is easier to fit into builds.
• Achievement art hookups tidied: “Return to sender” now uses its own icon instead of a generic trophy.
• Sticky Fingers (Cleric) is less grindy: now loot 5 chests in one run.
• Wyrmling HP trimmed to make them less of a speed bump.
• Hulker now has an on-hit chain swing chance (read: stay nimble around this unit).
• Minor stat/description cleanups across several enemies to better match their intended roles.
• Project/IDE update: migrated to the latest IDE (2024.1400.0.849) and modernized a few resource definitions.
  • This one is always tricky as I'm scared of what might break when updating to new IDE version, luckily only 1 or 2 problems with this
• Small AI refactor: resource list now uses auto_player (cleaner naming). Other internal code cleaned up. 
  • I would really like to revisit the AI player at some point. Originally I coded it for NZGDC 2023 to auto-play the game when it was idle, but since then the game has become somewhat more complex in terms of UI actions the that are driven through the virtual control object, making it hard for the AI to keep up with. 
  • I'd also like to explore possibility of a late-game feature where you can have a tweakable AI play the game for you, giving an idle-game experience where you're just making one or two of the decisions and guiding the build. 

I'm sure there are lots of I've missed and there are always small changes all around the place that we sometimes don't fully document (code is a living document, am I right?), but those are a few. 

Quite a few small bug fixes all over the place too (thanks to those of you diligently reporting these).