Prismatic Maze is now in Latvian!
May the streets be paved with Coins!
Hey Everybody!
With this update, Pigment Creatures now generate Coins as they grow & spread them out inside their Mazes.
Players can pick up coins like other items in the Maze, adding them to their collection upon completing the Maze.
Coins are part of a growing lists of collectible Treasure items.
Coins come in five denominations - Iron, Copper, Silver, Gold & Platinum.
Each Pigment is born with variable DNA traits.
The Prosperity trait controls how likely they are to generate coins each time they grow.
As they get older, they generate higher denomination coins.
Coins are also a form of in-game currency that will be used in various ways in future updates.
Hello Latvia!
Also, our friend Pēteris Lediņš has translated the game into Lativan!
Steam doesn't even have a language selection for Latvian, but maybe they will at some point :)
The localization process has been an interesting lesson in languages, especially in what does and does not translate easily.
Humor, wordplay & quotes especially are difficult to translate well.
Thinking about future translation really helps clarify how you plan to present or display text.
Thanks so much to all of our translators; you guys are awesome!
Automatic Updates and Versioning Saves!
Hopefully, nobody is going to see this when they play the game, but it's a super cool feature :)
I'm going to go into this in much more detail in another post, so this is the short version...
Prismatic Maze stores a lot of the stuff in long term state, on disk in a file-based database format.
As features are added or changed with updates over time, the shape of various things in long term state data saved and the details in data itself may also change.
At any given time, a new game could be created and played through using the shape of the data at that time without worrying about versioning it.
But, a save game that was created some time ago could also be revisited after some significant changes had been made.
The ability for the game engine to load a save game that is in an older format than the current one is potentially tricky.
To address this, lots of things that get saved are versioned and I use a few different patterns to describe, detect and update versioned data in the game engine.
In this update, I finally added a robust database schema updating system that automatically brings older saved files up to the current version.
Prior to this update, I had to be very cautious about what could be changed in order not to break support for loading older saved game files.
New Monthly Update Cadence!
When Prismatic Maze was first released, I did updates pretty frequently in the first week, addressing immediate issues found at launch.
Following that, I put out weekly updates for the first month & bi-weekly updates for the second and third months.
This update marks the first update after a month since the previous.
The main reason this one took longer was personal.
My wife and I took a vacation and renewed our vows for our Anniversay.
Also, I needed to spend some time taking care of home stuff.
Those two things knocked out close to three weeks, during which I was unable to work on the game.
That said, I think a monthly cadence is a good one going forward.
It lets me work on bigger things and allows updates to have more content and make more significant changes.
It reduces publishing overhead, which easily takes a full day with each release.
It allows time to experiment and explore new ideas or address other personal things without getting anxious about the next update (work life balance, ya'all).
It reduces messaging spam for players, giving enough time between updates to feel like returning to see what the new update does worth the effort.
So, for the next while, I'm planning to put out updates on a Monthly cadence.
Lots of cool things in the coming months, I'm super excited to share them with you ;)
Thanks,
Chani.
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20190725
* add Latvian localization
* update Pigment creatures to spawn coins in hallway positions during growth cycle
* add automatic update features for map files
* filter time items in new maze recipe based on map size (prevent smaller maps from adding larger time items)
See blog post for more details & images:
http://www.badmonkeylove.com/prismatic-maze-update-20190725