2.6.5 Update: Level 80 Change + Graphical Improvements

I rushed to push through the 2.6.5 patch for Circuit Dude, today. This patch included a few minor graphical tweaks, including a new pixel art font in the settings menu, as well as a simpler on-screen D-pad graphic. There were other minor, technical tweaks, as well, that should allow better scaling and window resizing that was carried over from the mobile versions of the game.

However, the biggest change is a new level 80 in the game, which seems like a weird thing to change years after the game was released, but please allow me to explain the importance of this change... I'll paraphrase/quote some of what I said from a previous discussion I had with another Steam user:

I pride myself in the levels that I have created for Circuit Dude. The levels that I created took many, many hours of design and testing, tweaking and playing through, iterating and guessing. I have never played Pocoman, but looking at a playthrough, it was brought to my attention that level 80 of Circuit Dude did, in fact, appear to be plagiarized from that game. Needless to say, I feel completely embarrassed that this was left in to the final game. Every level that I created had somewhat of a unique starting point as I gathered inspiration from all sorts of different games, and being so long ago, I cannot remember the exact circumstances of how this level came came to be, so I could only imagine what must have happened in order for this mistake to be made.

Even when pulling inspiration from other games, I was sure to include twists or design choices that not only set apart Circuit Dude's levels from the originals, but also included use of mechanics that made the solution only possible in Circuit Dude. Inspiration of levels for Circuit Dude range from Spelling Jungle to Adventures of Lolo, to Bobby Carrot, to Pokemon and Zelda, and, of course, Sokoban. In fact, in searching for new inspiration or researching classic level design, I recreated several levels from other games that I replayed through to use as a base or to play around with. As I said, I had never played Pocoman, but in my reflection, I have found that several levels from that game are available within a Sokoban clone that I did play.

With all that said, I can only imagine that one of two things must have happened for the level to end up in Circuit Dude:

1. I recreated a level from the Sokoban clone in order to play through it with the intent of playing with the design/solution until it was a completely different level and I marked it in my notes incorrectly as being a final design. (I did launch the game with a level or two in incomplete states and had to release a bug fix. I think this was because I re-arranged the level order so many times and had several design passes through certain selections of levels based off of the notes I had made.) With the incorrect notes, it made its way into the game, getting mixed in with the other, genuinely unique and self-made levels.

Or, 2) I actually did go through the entire process of creating a new puzzle using the Pocoman/Sokoban level as a base and saved it into an older stash of level data files that I had and did not include it in the most updated set of levels. This means that the new level may have been lost as I purged the older placeholder levels in favor of the (what I thought were) most up-to-date levels.

Regardless of what happened, I'd like to reiterate that I completely agree that plagiarism is wrong and I must try my best to rectify this problem as it was definitely not my intention to steal anyone else's creative works or to use levels from existing games.

This weekend, I went through all of the notes that I had from my original few design passes of Circuit Dude to get to the bottom of how this mistake could have happened. Unfortunately, this search did not yield any helpful information. This search also did not result in me finding any original level 80 that could have existed. I only found a handful partial level designs. Going forward, I'm going to do a deeper dive through my notes and through all of the levels in Circuit Dude.

As soon as I woke up this morning, I started working on designing a new level 80 that fit well into the level progression curve that I created for Circuit Dude, using a combination of mechanics that are only found in Circuit Dude to ensure that the level is completely unique and could not be found in any other puzzle game. It took me several hours to complete the design, so if you have already played through level 80, I highly suggest jumping back into the game to try out the new level layout.

I'd like to publicly thank the player for bringing this to my attention. I'd hate for anyone to think that I let you down, or anyone who purchased my game. I'm a solo developer and this is really the first project I've ever sold, so I'm trying my best to make sure that it's as genuine as I can make it. I also love designing levels and puzzles, so this fix is patch was something I was more than happy to put together.

Thank you for your understanding and continued support, ya'll!

• Jonathan Holmes (crait)