Updated Demo and Patreon Announcement

Hey y'all!

I'm still floored by the amazing compo we had in November! We got so many awesome games in one collection. Go check the rest of that out if you haven't already, there's some really cool stuff in there. Anyway, a couple of quick announcements:

Full Game - Full Steam Ahead
Tactus has proven fairly popular, and I've decided to move ahead with fleshing it out into a full game that can be released standalone and as a physical cartridge. To that end, I'll be posting semi-regular development updates to my Patreon, which you can view at this elegant and finely crafted link: https://www.patreon.com/zeta0134

Just to set expectations about the project moving forward:
- The full version of Tactus will be a paid game, with the price yet to be determined
- The final game will have many more enemies, additional maps, a shop system, and any other mechanics I think might be interesting
- The plan is for at least 4 zones, with a unique boss fight at the end of each zone
- For speedrunners, a fixed seed mode will be included
- As a rhythm game, Tactus will have many original songs. In addition to my own music, I'm commissioning songs from a few other chiptuners in the NESDev community
- I'm undecided on whether to keep Action53 or switch to a more conventional mapper, but I'll at the very least be ditching the 64kB size limit from the Compo. The music alone will break this limit
- I'll be posting in-development builds of the full game to my Patreons. I may occasionally upload new demo builds to this itch.io page ahead of the launch
- If I can find a supplier, I fully intend to release a physical cartridge.
- When it's ready, the Action53 cartridge for the compo will include the most updated demo build.
- Alas, I cannot provide an ETA. It will be finished when it's ready. Until my Patreon can pay the mortgage, I need to keep working at my day job.

Demo Update v0.2 - Quality of Life Patch
Thanks to feedback from several playtesters during (🎉) and after (😱) the compo, I've made these changes to the demo build:
- When picking up a new weapon, your old weapon is now left behind. Accidentally "upgraded" to a LV1 Dagger? No worries, now you can put it back.
- Birb enemies are nerfed: they should no longer wreck the music or crash the game on occasion
- Moving enemies should no longer get stuck "underneath" the player, dealing continual damage
- Sound channels are rearranged: now SFX is less rude to the music
- Weapons may no longer attack out-of-bounds tiles
- Screen shake now reliably shows the correct nametable

Known issues in the current demo:
- HUD drawing can still lag if the player moves too quickly in a cleared room. It'll correct itself as soon as the player slows down, which is forced upon entering any room with enemies. (Sorry speedrunners!)

I will intentionally leave the contest entry available for historical reasons, alongside any updates to the demo. Obviously the contest version has all of the above bugs and possibly more. Choose wisely!

Embedded Demo
Now that the contest has ended, I can finally edit the description and embed the demo. Now you can play it in your browser. Hooray!
"But Zeta, couldn't you have done this months ago?"

Enjoy!