Update v0.4 – Random Puzzles, UI Rework, & New Animations!
Hello everyone, We are so excited to announce that Update v0.4 has finally arrived; bringing the first version of the randomized puzzle system and a brand new look to the entire game. First and foremost, we would like to thank you all once again for continuing to support us and p
Hello everyone,
We are so excited to announce that Update v0.4 has finally arrived; bringing the first version of the randomized puzzle system and a brand new look to the entire game.
First and foremost, we would like to thank you all once again for continuing to support us and providing feedback. Linklight would be nothing without you all and we are eternally thankful to have such an amazing fan base who care so deeply about our game. We have spent countless days and nights designing, implementing, and improving Linklight; it makes us incredibly happy to see you all enjoying the end result of all the work we put in.
Without further ado, let’s dive into all of the new features of this update.
The first version of the randomized level system has now been implemented, along with the level generation menu which is accessible from the main menu.
The random level generator allows you to generate a random campaign of levels, letting you choose how many chapters you would like, the amount of levels per chapter, and the overall difficulty of the campaign.
These difficulty presets will undoubtedly require fine tuning to perfect in the future, so please feel free to give us any feedback on these difficulties if you try them out!
The level generator also allows you to generate an individual random level; this setting comes with two generation modes, basic and advanced.
Basic generation mode is quite simple as it allows the user to input a level seed if desired, but this mode will give you a singular random level.
Advanced generation mode allows for further control of the level generation process; everything about a level can be configured. This includes the width and height, the placement and enablement of certain objects, along with the number of certain key objects.
For everyone who has been asking for more levels, we hope you all will enjoy this update.
The possibilities are endless.
This system is undoubtedly the most complicated in the entire game.
It is difficult for us to put into words the sheer amount of planning, development, and testing that it took to get this system to where it is today.
With this in mind, we believe the best approach to perfect and evolve the system over time is incremental updates with continuous user feedback.
In other words, we will add new improvements, features, and bug fixes over time in different patches until it is finished and stable. We believe this is the best option to test a system as complicated as seed based random levels, as your feedback will be crucial to the development of this system.
The current version of this system only supports one battery per random level, multiple batteries with a singular level is a priority for us and will be one of the first incremental updates this system will receive once we make sure the current version has been rolled out and tested more extensively.
If you do find any issue or have any feedback on a level, please make sure to include these values in your report; these are accessible via the escape menu when playing a generated level.
As you may have noticed from the level generation menu (and possibly the level screenshots if you have a very keen eye) there were some major reworks to Linklight's overall user interface.
All of Linklight's menus have gotten a fresh redesign from both a design and utility perspective. Menus now utilize a more simple and minimalist light background, with dark contrasting elements.
The level selector most notably has received a major update. Campaigns can now be filtered and searched for by name and even by category. There are now screenshots and a brief description to provide some insight into the campaign and its contents; this will be beneficial when it comes to workshop support. Information about the campaign along with your progress can be found below as well.
Despite this menu being redesigned and implemented, there is another design that we have been experimenting with that may make its way into the game soon. The current design breaks this menu into two sections, whereas our experimental design would combine them.
The backgrounds of all levels have undergone a redesign as well, utilizing a combination of blurs to bring more focus to the center of the board and create a more dreamlike design.
There is also a subtle saturation effect that plays as you make connections throughout the level; we would love some feedback on this! Let us know if you love it or hate it.
In addition to the backgrounds being redesigned, the levels themselves have received some new animations. There is a new introduction animation that plays when you start a level, fading animations that play as you traverse through levels and chapters, and a blur effect when you pause a level.
There was a lot of rework that needed to be done internally to support generated levels. The entire level system needed to be reworked internally to allow support for both predefined and dynamically generated levels.
On top of all these changes we have significantly modified all of Linklight's branding to better represent the game.
There were so many changes to Linklight both on the surface and internally to get the game to where it is today, that it would be difficult to even list them all.
For the near future, expect to see a new level selector design and continued updates to the level generation system.
This concludes most of our major changes for this update. Thank you all again for continuing to support us, words cannot express how grateful we are that you all have joined us for this journey.
Please let us know what you think of the latest update as your feedback means the world to us.
Thank you,
Highrise Software
Original post
The level generator also allows you to generate an individual random level; this setting comes with two generation modes, basic and advanced.
Basic generation mode is quite simple as it allows the user to input a level seed if desired, but this mode will give you a singular random level.
Advanced generation mode allows for further control of the level generation process; everything about a level can be configured. This includes the width and height, the placement and enablement of certain objects, along with the number of certain key objects.
For everyone who has been asking for more levels, we hope you all will enjoy this update.
The possibilities are endless.
This system is undoubtedly the most complicated in the entire game.
It is difficult for us to put into words the sheer amount of planning, development, and testing that it took to get this system to where it is today.
With this in mind, we believe the best approach to perfect and evolve the system over time is incremental updates with continuous user feedback.
In other words, we will add new improvements, features, and bug fixes over time in different patches until it is finished and stable. We believe this is the best option to test a system as complicated as seed based random levels, as your feedback will be crucial to the development of this system.
The current version of this system only supports one battery per random level, multiple batteries with a singular level is a priority for us and will be one of the first incremental updates this system will receive once we make sure the current version has been rolled out and tested more extensively.
If you do find any issue or have any feedback on a level, please make sure to include these values in your report; these are accessible via the escape menu when playing a generated level.
As you may have noticed from the level generation menu (and possibly the level screenshots if you have a very keen eye) there were some major reworks to Linklight's overall user interface.
All of Linklight's menus have gotten a fresh redesign from both a design and utility perspective. Menus now utilize a more simple and minimalist light background, with dark contrasting elements.
The level selector most notably has received a major update. Campaigns can now be filtered and searched for by name and even by category. There are now screenshots and a brief description to provide some insight into the campaign and its contents; this will be beneficial when it comes to workshop support. Information about the campaign along with your progress can be found below as well.
Despite this menu being redesigned and implemented, there is another design that we have been experimenting with that may make its way into the game soon. The current design breaks this menu into two sections, whereas our experimental design would combine them.
The backgrounds of all levels have undergone a redesign as well, utilizing a combination of blurs to bring more focus to the center of the board and create a more dreamlike design.
There is also a subtle saturation effect that plays as you make connections throughout the level; we would love some feedback on this! Let us know if you love it or hate it.
In addition to the backgrounds being redesigned, the levels themselves have received some new animations. There is a new introduction animation that plays when you start a level, fading animations that play as you traverse through levels and chapters, and a blur effect when you pause a level.
There was a lot of rework that needed to be done internally to support generated levels. The entire level system needed to be reworked internally to allow support for both predefined and dynamically generated levels.
On top of all these changes we have significantly modified all of Linklight's branding to better represent the game.
There were so many changes to Linklight both on the surface and internally to get the game to where it is today, that it would be difficult to even list them all.
For the near future, expect to see a new level selector design and continued updates to the level generation system.
This concludes most of our major changes for this update. Thank you all again for continuing to support us, words cannot express how grateful we are that you all have joined us for this journey.
Please let us know what you think of the latest update as your feedback means the world to us.
Thank you,
Highrise Software
Visually we made a minor change to the background design of all the levels, making it a bit more aesthetically pleasing and drawing more attention to the center of the screen.
Levels:
We are proud to say that the next update will also feature randomized levels, here's a sneak peek at some of the development screenshots.
We are planning to incrementally roll out updates to the randomized level generation system.
In other words, we will release a base version of the system in the next update and then add new improvements, features, and bug fixes over time in different patches until it is finished and stable. We believe this is the best option to test a system as complicated as seed based random levels, as your feedback will be crucial to the development of this system.
Overall, the next update will solidify Linklight's final look while providing our players with one of our most highly requested features.
We are honestly so excited for you all to be able to see and play the next update of the game when it comes out. This is going to be an amazing way to kick off what we hope will be our last year in Early Access.
Thank you all for continuing to support us.
Highrise Software
This will be incredibly useful to get a better look at larger levels.
There are some additional features we could add to the zooming, such as making it a lot smoother, animating the zoom, bouncing the camera around the edges of the level, etc. These are all features we would like to add, however we are unsure if they will be in the next update or at some point over the summer.
The majority of people who voted wished for the UI to keep its current colorized style, so we will respect the wishes of the community and keep this style consistent. Although the overall style will remain consistent we do have some minor UI changes in the works. The main menu and options menu will undergo some stylistic changes. The level selector however will likely receive a major update since we feel that the current version is too cluttered. The levels themselves will have a very minor change made to the backgrounds, but will essentially remain the same. Linklight will retain its colorful style as opposed to the pure colorless minimalist UI that was conceptualized.
We are also planning on taking time to work on a website for Highrise Software. As an indie developer a website is an essential and it is something that we have been putting off on creating for far too long.
The semester is nearly over for the both of us thankfully and this summer will give us a lot more time to work on Linklight.
So for the next few weeks, we plan to implement the UI changes. develop and launch our official website, and potentially add some more functionality to the panning and zooming if time allows.
For the long term, our goals remain the same. Once the semester concludes for us, work will continue on randomized levels.
Thank you all for continuing to support us,
Highrise Software
It was not easy to fit the design of the levels in such a small space, so by natural design a lot of these levels are quite large.
There are fifteen new holiday themed levels in total!
Don't let the size of these levels intimidate you. You can now solve parts of it and come back to it another time without losing your progress. We have added mid-level saving at the request of our community.
For all of Linklight's campaigns, the highest level you have completed in that campaign will have mid-level saving enabled. Basically, the levels that you have unlocked and are not completed yet, will have their mid-level progress saved. Make sure to exit the game properly through either the escape menu, or the main menu to ensure you don't lose your save progress!
If you've been on a level for quite a while and want to give it another shot, or just want to try something completely different, you are now able to reset the level via the escape menu.
Sometimes it's good to start over.
It's also good to reflect. In the past when you finished a level, the level would automatically transition to the next level in the game, this would not give you a chance to reflect on the path you took to complete the level. At the request of our community, we have added an option to toggle the automatic transition of a level. This option is enabled by default in the options menu.
When you finish a level with this option disabled, a clickable arrow will appear to transition to the next level whenever you are ready.
Speaking of starting over, the level selection menu was almost entirely redesigned in order to support multiple campaigns.
The new level selector will allow you to easily play and view your progress throughout the main campaign, the Winter 2020 campaign, and any future campaign expansions. A similarly designed menu will likely be used to handle workshop support in the future.
We also made significant optimizations to the generation of new objects, this has led to an increase in performance, most notably when particles are generated. We still have more optimizations to do however, we'll talk further about this in January.
We spoke about adding a new object in our last update blog, however we decided not to implement the object we had in mind. We felt this would have tilted the game towards being less casual and a bit more difficult, and we are not sure if this is what our community would want. Linklight as a whole is meant to be both relaxing and also challenging, so its important that we keep a fine balance between these two elements. In the future, before adding any additional objects or any other elements that may impact this balance, we will almost certainly ask all of you your thoughts before we do so.
That's the main content for this update. We worked really hard to bring you all this update, we hope you will enjoy it. :)
If you encounter any issues at all, please let us know in the community hub. Despite the holidays we'll still be active to patch the game or deal with any issues that arise. You can also find the changelog of the update below.
Thank you all again for the support so far, it means the world to us. Despite what is going on in the world, we hope you all have a happy holiday.