Update v0.1 - The Winter 2020 Update

Happy holidays everyone! The winter update for Linklight has finally arrived!

This is Linklight's first massive update and we have a lot to talk about.

Our major focus for this update was to add some new content for all our players, which has come in the form of a new campaign. The Winter 2020 campaign is now available for all players!

It was not easy to fit the design of the levels in such a small space, so by natural design a lot of these levels are quite large.

There are fifteen new holiday themed levels in total!

Don't let the size of these levels intimidate you. You can now solve parts of it and come back to it another time without losing your progress. We have added mid-level saving at the request of our community.

For all of Linklight's campaigns, the highest level you have completed in that campaign will have mid-level saving enabled. Basically, the levels that you have unlocked and are not completed yet, will have their mid-level progress saved. Make sure to exit the game properly through either the escape menu, or the main menu to ensure you don't lose your save progress!

If you've been on a level for quite a while and want to give it another shot, or just want to try something completely different, you are now able to reset the level via the escape menu.

Sometimes it's good to start over.

It's also good to reflect. In the past when you finished a level, the level would automatically transition to the next level in the game, this would not give you a chance to reflect on the path you took to complete the level. At the request of our community, we have added an option to toggle the automatic transition of a level. This option is enabled by default in the options menu.

When you finish a level with this option disabled, a clickable arrow will appear to transition to the next level whenever you are ready.

Speaking of starting over, the level selection menu was almost entirely redesigned in order to support multiple campaigns.

The new level selector will allow you to easily play and view your progress throughout the main campaign, the Winter 2020 campaign, and any future campaign expansions. A similarly designed menu will likely be used to handle workshop support in the future.

We also made significant optimizations to the generation of new objects, this has led to an increase in performance, most notably when particles are generated. We still have more optimizations to do however, we'll talk further about this in January.

We spoke about adding a new object in our last update blog, however we decided not to implement the object we had in mind. We felt this would have tilted the game towards being less casual and a bit more difficult, and we are not sure if this is what our community would want. Linklight as a whole is meant to be both relaxing and also challenging, so its important that we keep a fine balance between these two elements. In the future, before adding any additional objects or any other elements that may impact this balance, we will almost certainly ask all of you your thoughts before we do so.

That's the main content for this update. We worked really hard to bring you all this update, we hope you will enjoy it. :)

If you encounter any issues at all, please let us know in the community hub. Despite the holidays we'll still be active to patch the game or deal with any issues that arise. You can also find the changelog of the update below.

Thank you all again for the support so far, it means the world to us. Despite what is going on in the world, we hope you all have a happy holiday.

Official Changelog:

Campaigns

• Added a new class called, "Campaigns" to provide a structure for different sets of levels to be separated from each other.

• Reworked A LOT of the game's internal systems to handle multiple campaigns.

Winter 2020 Campaign

• Added the Winter 2020 campaign with one level set titled, Remembrance, which contains 15 festive themed levels.

Saving

• Added mid-level saving and resuming functionality for levels that are not completed by the player.

• Added conversion of save files to handle multiple campaigns.

Launcher

• Updated the launcher icon.

Engine

• Optimized object creation; this led to noticeable improvements when many objects were created at once such as particles.

Level Player

• Added an arrow that will transition the player to the next level section if the, "Automatic Level Transitions" option is disabled in the options menu.

Escape Menu

• Added a reset button that triggers an animation to reset the level to its default state.

• Changed the background of the menu from white to black.

• Added text encouraging user feedback at the bottom of the menu.

Level Selector

• Entirely new redesign to display the new Campaign class. The information displayed includes the campaign, the level sets, the author of the campaign, the date it was created, and a small description about the campaign.

• Improved the scaling calculation to calculate the UI scale of the level sets.

• Added scrolling functionality.

• Updated the gradient of the background.

Options Menu

• Added an option to enable/disable the automatic transition of a level when its completed. This is enabled by default.

• Fixed a crash that would occur when scaling the size of a level while fixing a conflict.

• Updated the gradient of the background.

Main Menu

• Updated the gradient of the background.

Main Campaign

• Added description, author, and date created information.

• Fixed the wrong background being displayed in level set V when the aspect ratio was 16:10.