What's new in the demo:
A proper opening
A 10-second sequence now plays before the demo loads: MURBUL Games, then our partner IITU University, each fading up and away on a dark ground, with the menu music already playing underneath and the copyright line shown in your chosen language. Any key or click skips it.
The board falls when you lose
Running out of moves no longer snaps straight to Game Over. The board collapses under its own weight first, then the screen arrives with your score. Turned off automatically on Low graphics.
About twice as fast at high resolutions
The menu wall, the dark overlay, every button, the panels and the skin cards are now built once and reused instead of being redrawn every frame. At 3840×2160:
Screen | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
Main menu | 24.56 ms (41 fps) | 12.45 ms (80 fps) |
Inventory | 36.16 ms | 18.89 ms |
Settings | 32.62 ms | 16.74 ms |
At 2560×1440 the menu went from 86 to 179 fps; at 1920×1080, from 153 to 307. The picture is pixel-for-pixel identical - this is the same art drawn far fewer times.
Locked skins look the part
The locked skins in the inventory are no longer blank squares with a question mark on them. Each one is a dark plate lit in the colour of the rarity behind it, with a highlight travelling slowly across the glass and the lock in the middle. Hovering brightens it.
The question mark is gone: the padlock already says "locked", and at that size a "?" pulled the eye to punctuation instead of to the rarity colour which is the part that tells you what you are missing. The order was also changed so the first skins you see are different tiers rather than three gold ones in a row.
A cleaner board
The score now sits as a large plain number directly above the board, instead of a labelled line in the corner. With the word gone it has the whole board width to fill, so it reads at a glance.
The power-up button is gone as well. Power-ups are bought in the store and charged by playing duels, neither of which the demo has, so the button could only ever have opened a tray of zeroes. The coin and trophy counters are hidden for the same reason.
Fixedːsteamthisː
The demo could show your full-game skins and record. It shared a save folder with the full game, so on a machine that owns Tile Blast the demo read that account's inventory, personal best and login. It now saves somewhere of its own, and its inventory is filtered to the three demo skins whatever it finds on disk.
The demo talked to our servers on every launch.It requested a 50-row leaderboard at startup for a screen it does not even have. That request is gone.
A demo score could become a saved personal best. It is now discarded as intended, so the "what would your highscore be?" line means what it says.
The DEMO badge could be hidden by the menu buttons. When the button column did not fit below the logo it was drawn on top of it, covering the word DEMO.
The Windows icon was the full game's. Rebuilt from the demo artwork at every size Windows asks for.
Profile and Friends are now locked with the rest. They are account features, and the demo asks nobody to register, so they could only ever have opened an empty card and a list with nobody in it.
What the demo includes
Classic mode, three skins - Pixel World, Arcade and Watermelon and a look at the rest of the game: Time Mode, 1 vs 1, the leaderboard and the store are all shown, locked, with a word about what is behind them.
Scores are not saved. When a run ends the demo shows what you got and asks what your record might have been.