Putting the project on hold

I've decided to put the Phantom Knight on indefinite hold. My reasoning for it is that I've just not had the motivation to keep working on it seeing as nobody really cares that the game exists and I realized that I've been putting all this effort into something people won't even have the chance to enjoy. I updated the game (in the 3.5 alpha) with some improvements and some new features which are as follows:

-Cursor system for mouse: When using mouse and keyboard, there is an omnipresent cursor which indicates the direction of attacks, dashes, items, etc.

-Climbing out of well animation: It may not be that great, but I made an animation of the player coming out of the well in the first stage. I think it provides a better reason for why the player would be in the woods. The story explanation is that he was imprisoned in an underground system and he escapes through the well.

-the Menu is slightly improved: I made the code for the menu more efficient

 -Picking up ground items: I added boxes and barrels which can be picked up and put down with [F] or (Y) or (triangle). They don't serve any purpose other than decoration in the arcade, but in the campaign they would be used for puzzles and would drop items.

-AI partner: In the one player modes, there is an AI controlled player which runs around and fights enemies. I spent a whole day trying to get the AI right. For those who watch "AI and Games" on YouTube, it uses a combination of a finite state machine and a behavior tree.

-Performance improvements: I made it so grass objects not in view are not processed, giving a major boost in performance.

-General bug fixes: Some menu and game play bugs

What I plan to add when I bring this project from the dead:

-Boomerangs: a little item which circles back to the player to supplement the axe and spears.

-Options to play the arcade without the AI partner.

-More enemies in the fire ruins: I was thinking a large beast with horns and claws.

-Change the dog sprite in the dead forest.

-Make the climbing out of the well animation better

-Make it so trees not in view are not processed to add even more performance

-Refactor certain parts of the enemy AI to make the code more efficient (right now it's kind of a mess and I've been putting off fixing it for months)

-Make the barrels and boxes drop items when broken so they're actually useful

-Bosses: I want to have a boss room between every area. The first boss will be a larger and scarier version of the rhino, the second boss will be a big skeleton, and the final boss will be either the fire beast or a mage. Right now I'm not sure how I'm going to program all of the bosses different states and animating them all should prove to be a nightmare. I'm not that great with animation, and things such as the player climbing out of the well and the attack animations are the epitome of laziness.

-I'll add animations for the enemies attacking: Right now they just sorta walk towards the player and deal damage, and I want them to actually look like they're attacking. Part of the reason that I haven't done this (other than the fact that I don't want to have to animate it) is that I would have to change how enemy states work which I don't particularly feel like doing.

-Typing out these features that I want to add is starting to inspire me to work on this game again. So I might work on some of the easier improvements and put out an update soon (no promises though). 

If you guys want me to add something or change something, simply leave a comment. Even though the game is on hold, I don't mind going back into the project to change something and put out an update on Itch.io. (Who am I kidding, nobody has ever left a comment on any of my projects and nobody knows or cares that this game exists.) So yeah this game will probably never come out and die a slow death as vapor-ware because nobody downloaded it. It's free though and only 8 megabytes so in my opinion there's no harm in doing so. This may be the last devlog I'm putting out, or not. It depends on how many people see this and how many people downloaded the game. So far only 9 people have downloaded the game and most downloaded an outdated alpha instead of the most recent one. Nobody has downloaded the zip file containing all the alphas yet so I'm a little scared that people downloaded the second alpha by accident and didn't realize that it was missing features that the newest update had. This is 100% my fault, because I accidentally put the second alpha on top of everything else and didn't label alpha 3 with an alpha number. All of this is of course fixed with the new update which places everything in a zip file.

TL;DR: I'm putting the game on hold because i don't feel like making it anymore. I put out an update today and don't mind putting out another one in the future if people want me to add specific features.