The big list of tasks has run dry and I cannot avoid alpha testing anymore!
Alpha testing is where I ask people I'm close with to test out the game. Some will have played before, others will be new to it.
Once I've fixed bugs and polished up from the feedback, it'll be time to run an invite only beta test for those in Discord. Some bug fixing and after that - GAME DEMO! Very exciting. If you're not able to join in on the Beta, that's OK - the demo will follow soon after and that demo will evolve toward a 1.0 release. Think of it as free early access.
Making Tea?
They say that a game is never finished, you just stop adding to it. I believe that a game without tea brewing isn't finished until you add making tea to it. The most requested feature (and even raised as a bug) was that you couldn't make tea. Now you need to feed the tea boiler with a huge amount of steam to make tea. It has no other game function but for the joy of making tea.
Steam now pushes everything
Steam jetting quickly out of the end of a pipe always pushed the player but now it pushes anything that's loose! Scrap, broken pipes and even poor little fire sprites - they all get pushed across the Clomper! The more steam there is, the faster they go!
More FPS!
The pre-demo performance pass is done! I spent a lot of time analysing the lag spikes and fixing the worst offenders. I'll need to test on some older computers (I have an older laptop to test on) but I think a steady 60fps is possible.
2025 is definitely the year of the demo!
Rob