It's slowly the time to wrap up the release of the twenty-second Alpha. The plans for this version were ambitious, but I had to postpone many of them, otherwise the update would have taken way too long. Nothing is lost though, as the remaining features will make it into Alpha23, and whatever is already done, will be out earlier.
So, what's coming in Alpha22? The main feature is the dedicated tutorial mode. I've already written a little bit on what it will look like here and here. The tutorial is almost finished, and I'm taking feedback from testers right now to make sure that it covers as many basics of the game as possible. As you can imagine, having worked on the game for 4 years, I can be prone to overlooking many things. :P
There are some other nice features coming along, like the 2-3 times faster saving and loading, smaller save files, portals reworked as dungeon furniture, and fixes in equipment management. These are not huge changes, but as I've written in previous posts, they involved a lot of work under the hood, and have easily taken at least half of development time of this release.
The other big features that I promised before, like the endless mode, content additions from the wiki, and key mapping configuration, are going to come in Alpha23, as I've mentioned in the beginning.
My plan right now is to finish up the tutorial. In the meantime, many Steam users are already testing the new build, and I've received quite a few bug reports, for which I'm very thankful. Once all the known bugs are fixed, and the tutorial is finished, Alpha22 will be ready. Sounds easy! I'm hopeful that it will happen in early June.