Surprise! I'm back with style-- I mean the stylizer, a new feature with which you can customize the look and feel of the game. Read on to learn about the latest update, what I've been up to and what's next!
Alternative Designs
Spread: Transmission has always been about customization so a feature to customize the visuals and sounds just had to happen. This update introduces a Prototype 5 "Unleash the Storm"-themed sky, ocean, and rain effects as well as a beach themed island design.
You can find the style customizer in the main menu's options menu. More themes are going to be added in future updates, but I'm going to be completely honest with you, this update was also just an excuse for me to celebrate Halloween, which leads me to...
Spooktober Special Theme
That's right! For the month of October you can also play with a limited-time Halloween theme. This theme includes a night sky, a polluted ocean, an island covered with tombstones and candles, and most importantly ghostly new friends haunting the islands.
Seasonal themes get selected automatically at the beginning of the month (you can disable this in the options menu). More seasonal themes may be added in future updates.
Changelog
⭐ Highlights
- Become an island designer and switch up the game's look. Choose freely between different styles from the base game, beach or "Unleash the Storm"-collection.
- Celebrate the spooky month of October with the limited-time Spooktober special style. This set includes new island decoration, night sky and scary new friends!
🪶 Change
- Removed campfire particles as they no longer suited the game's style.
🔧 Fixes
- Water quality will now actually be affected by the chosen graphics option.
- Fixed a light and shadow configuration error. This should improve the game's visuals and performance.
- Island decoration can now spawn on the outer parts of the island again.
- Double charge cells should no longer cause the game to occasionally freeze (if you are still experiencing issues, please reach out to me on the Steam forums or our Discord server).
- "Choose Labs"-prompt will now properly scale with the screen size.
So it's been a year, what happened?
Originally, this update was supposed to release last October, it was mostly complete albeit being cut short due to Unity's license changes. Back then I had to invest a lot of time researching what these changes meant for the game because it was not properly communicated and in the end, I had to cancel the update altogether since I kept running into these sneaky changes and I just didn't have the time to deal with them.
While I wasn't very surprised by this development, it has been extremely demoralizing. So, I started exploring my options. My plan was to port the game to an engine that provides more stability than Unity, that way I don't need to worry about any shady business practices anymore. I tried different engines and even started working on a custom one, however I quickly realized that while I would love to do that, I just didn't have the time to remake the entire game and to be completely honest, I would also love to work on a different game at some point. As much as I love Spread, it was meant to be a small project, but things rarely go according to plan in game development.
At this point, six months already passed and a couple of opportunities for pitching the game arose, so I started focusing on that for a while. For one of those pitches I created a proof of concept web version of the game, that can also be played on mobile. I wasn't able to just port the entire game, as this would've taken too long for a mere proof of concept, instead I created a very simple visually re-imagined version of the game.
I want to reiterate that this is very much a proof of concept and about as stable as the very first prototype of Spread: Transmission, nonetheless if you are interested you can try this version out for yourself as it is available as activity on the Discord server. You can even install the activity to your account and play it anywhere you want afterwards! Just note that this version of Spread: Transmission only includes the base mode and is Multiplayer only.
And now you are pretty much caught up! Nothing came of these pitches except the web version of Spread, so I once again gave up on the hunt for publishers and started focusing on finishing the game.
What happens next?
Next, I believe it is time to work on the 1.0 version of the game. For the full release of Spread: Transmission, I'm planning on shifting the focus towards casual players and I will be introducing features meant to make the game more self-explainable, for example by highlighting cells that are able to spread or by providing more contexts about certain moves (explaining why a move could be good or bad). This update will also include the final Lab called 'Item Lab', introducing a whole new world of possibilities to the game. These are my main priorities for now, but I will keep you posted about any developments and changes.
My life is pretty stressful right now, but I hope I will have more news for you soon! For now, I hope you'll enjoy this little Halloween treat. Feel free to share your thoughts either here, on the Steam forums, or our Discord server. Talk to you soon!
~ Cave 💛