Lots of quick little things to go over in today's announcement post.
SOUNDTRACK ON SPOTIFY AND SOUNDCLOUD
Let's start with the biggest and most exciting news to fans of the soundtrack: Part 1 of the Instruments of Destruction Original Soundtrack is now available to stream:
Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/album/0SqAzTQ5bx3oFhRdamj9pj
SoundCloud - https://soundcloud.com/auvicmusic
Auvic has done an amazing job on this music, and I'm glad to have most of the songs now easily accessible away from the game. Part 2 of the soundtrack will include the songs not present, along with new tracks coming to the game in the future (no ETA on part 2 yet).
TANKS VIDEO
The TANKS Featured Vehicles video is now ready, so you can see the awesome winners and honorable mentions in action without having to download them all yourself. Thanks to my new video editor Ryan for cranking through the editing of this footage so quickly, and much appreciation to everyone who entered!
VERSION 0.122B - DROP SHADOWS!
Next, a small-ish update went live just a little while ago. Here's the changelist for version 0.122b:
* Drop shadows added to most text that had no background
* Tripled max delay time for release connector and bomb
* Increased XP needed to level up (only affects new players)
* Fixed gamepad not controlling camera with Gamepad In Menus turned off
The first one doesn't sound like much at first glance, but it affects the game's look fairly significantly, and is something people have been requesting since the game came out. I finally went through the UI and added drop shadows to nearly all the text that didn't already have some sort of background. I wasn't really excited for drop shadows because it changes the "style" of the UI to be less cohesive (IMO), but it's such a minor stylistic change, and a major improvement to readability, that I have to admit it's an improvement overall no matter how you look at it. If you find any text you think still needs tweaks just let me know.
PROTOTYPE ISLANDS COMING SOON
Last minor announcement is that rather than building out only a couple highly-polished islands at a time (slowly), I'll be taking a different approach to new islands. I'll be generating lots of prototype islands as quickly as I can, and getting those playable in the main campaign for you guys to try. These rough islands will available in play mode, probably to the northeast (up and right) of the current islands. I hope to get lots of prototype islands out over the new few weeks, and refine those that are the most fun.
There's a little under-the-hood work to do to make the campaign more flexible in how islands are sorted, but it's easy work. If all goes well, you should start seeing new islands this week, with many more to come soon.