Update #11

It's the monthly update - even though it's not quite been a month yet!

Story Mode Completed

All the maps, gimmicks, ability unlocks and story dialog have been completed. You can now play through all 30 days of the game and actually complete it! That feels like a big milestone.

I'll probably be going back through the dialog and cleaning it up a bit, but overall it should be fun enough to read through.

Bug Fixes

A few fixes have been pushed up in this patch. One is to fix a reported issue by acaciaofhyrule where you could wait for the Whirlpool trap ability to expire, then placing a tile on it would cause the game to lock up. That's now been fixed.

There's also a few other minor tweaks and fixes that have gone up. I found a weird edge case with the "Complete" paths that were not being scored. I thought I had caught them all, but apparently one still managed to sneak through. It's a funny area of code because on the face of it, it seems out of all the path types it would be the easiest to program. But somehow it ends up being the most difficult because you don't always know when to stop checking for connecting bridges. It should work much smoother now.

What's Next

Next on the list is achievements and perhaps that little extra feature I mentioned last update.

This game is getting very close to being done. What's crazy is that when I started working on this back in January last year, I thought it would only take me a few months to wrap up. I had originally done a previous version of the game that I thought was basically feature complete. I figured all I had to do was add in some multiplayer (how hard could that be!), make a story mode (peice of cake!), replace the artwork and music (I'll get some professionals to do that!) and bingo bango I'll be done in a few months.

Yeah, well, I might have underestimated how much work there was to do. I heard a developer once sum it up quite well as: "It's easy to make a game you can release, it's hard to make a game you can sell".

It could be fun to make a post here going through all the versions of the game that existed before. At one point the game was actually about 2 armies fighting each other - I had units and pathing and everything setup! It was a bit painful to delete all that code, haha.

I found this old screenshot on my computer:

Anywho, that's it for this update!

Cheers!