It's the monthly update - and its getting down to the last few items before release!
New Maps
The quickplay mode has had an overhaul.
Quickplay maps now unlock as you proceed through the story, although it does start with a handful of maps already unlocked. The maps now have a bit more variety as the items available are now also specific to the selected maps (where as before every map had every item available). I think this will make each map more unique, plus it helps spread out the items over multiple days in the story mode (so you don't get overwhelmed with items right at the start).
There's also a hidden character now in the quickplay and multiplayer modes. Once you've completed the story mode, the final boss will unlock as an extra playable character ;)
The UI for the quickplay and multiplayer mode have been updated to look much nicer (or so I think!). I never had to program an interface that needs to handle both offline and online functionality, so the UI and code had started to get pretty messy over time. I took a new approach to designing it and it should be a lot more stable now (and should scale much nicer in multiple resolutions).
I also figured out a neat trick with displaying the map icons. Previously for the map icons I had to take screenshots of the map and then manually apply some photoshop filters to them to make it look good - which was a huge pain to maintain. What I'm doing now instead is reading in the data that the game uses to build the boards (which are from 10x11 png files with white and black pixels to denote filled and empty grid slots), then redrawing it at a larger size and doing a pallet swap on the pixels. I get dynamic icons then that I can use! Now, they don't look quite as good as the old icons because I can only work with the individual pixels, but I think they are passable.
Chillout Mode
This was the small extra feature I mentioned in the last update. This puts the game into a mode where the computer plays against itself forever. It will also by default turn off the game sounds, so you can load up the game in the background and listen to the music of Purrple Cat while a little demo of the game runs.
I had a few people mention to me that they had been alt+tabbing the game into the background to listen to the music while they work, so If figured I might as well make a mode out of it :)
I was thinking of having it automatically put itself into windowed mode when it begins, but I'm not sure if that would get annoying. Let me know what you all think of that.
Achievements
Achievements have now been added!
However...the artwork for them is temporary. I'm in the process of getting some proper icons, but it's kind of tricky to publish the Steam configuration with achievements setup without the achievements in the actual game (I think they would show up in the games store page, but you would never see them unlock in the game, which might make it seem like a bug). So to make things easier, I'm publishing them now with the temp artwork.
I've never programmed Achievements before, so if there's any issues do let me know :)
There's about 13 of them right now. I'll probably add some more in later (getting up to a nice round 20 would be a good goal), but I wanted to get this first 13 in just to test them and make sure they are working.
Thanks to Captain_Guile for the achievement ideas! :)
Bug Fixes
A few odds and ends have been fixed. I think the most obvious one, which is crazy I didn't notice it before...is that the AI couldn't use items. I think I had some code setup to allow this, but at some point forgot to merge it into the actual game. Whoops!
I've also changed the lucky paths so that now the numbers always connect in a way that would generate points. By that I mean, in the previous version you could get two lucky paths connecting, but the number might be "1" and "3". This lets you connect the paths, but it makes joining the numbers a bit awkward. The idea was originally it wasn't expected you always get to match the paths AND the numbers (so it would create some more choice by the player what tile to play), but after more playtesting I started realizing it was a bit confusing. So now when the lucky paths are created, they will always connect in a way that you would build a path out, eg, "1-2" or "2-2" etc.
What's Next
We're on the home stretch here. You might notice that some of the ability and item icons are still MSPaint drawings. I'm in the process of getting those last ones updated to new artwork, along with the achievement icons I mentioned. Once those are done (I'm hoping they can be wrapped up in the next month), I'll take 2-3 more weeks to lead up to the full release.
I also need to do some work to get the word out about the game. Marketing is hard, and since I'm the only developer on this game, it's hard to dedicate time to marketing when you have a full hacknplan board full of tickets. So I'll probably spend those weeks doing some twitter work.
If anyone wants to help, I'd appreciate it :)
Oh, and I'm probably going to get a bit of work done on the puzzle mode. I probably wont have that mode in until after the release (turns out figuring out how to store the data for the puzzles is much trickier than I thought), but I might be able to get the mode in with a few puzzles - perhaps I'll hide it behind a secret button on the menu for now, haha.
Ok, that's it for this month,
Cheers!