Happy New Year From Highrise Software! (Update v0.4 Sneak Peek)

We're wishing you all a happy new year!

The last couple months have been hectic for us to say the least, with universities starting to reopen and then closing again; it seems as if the same thing is happening to society as a whole nowadays. Despite the state of the world around us, we have been hard at work improving and adding new features to Linklight.

We realize that we have not been as communicative the last several months and we do apologize for that, it is something we are trying to work on. We are trying to find the best approach to take to keep you all in the loop while we work and maintain our personal lives. As we come closer to the full release of Linklight expect to hear from us a lot more.

Getting to the good stuff, we are proud to say this will undoubtedly be Linklight's largest update since its early access release.

A while back we held a poll asking our community what direction they wanted to see Linklight go in, either pure minimalist or partially minimalist similar to how the game is currently. The votes were unanimous to not make the game purely minimalist, so we kept this in mind when redoing the UI.

Ever since the winter update we felt that the UI could have been cleaned up a bit and improved, especially the level selection menu. We also overhauled the menus to utilize brighter backgrounds and darker elements to give the game a sleeker look. We feel this contrasts nicely when you enter a level and are then exposed to vibrant colors.

Level Selector:

Visually we made a minor change to the background design of all the levels, making it a bit more aesthetically pleasing and drawing more attention to the center of the screen.

Levels:

We are proud to say that the next update will also feature randomized levels, here's a sneak peek at some of the development screenshots.

We are planning to incrementally roll out updates to the randomized level generation system.

In other words, we will release a base version of the system in the next update and then add new improvements, features, and bug fixes over time in different patches until it is finished and stable. We believe this is the best option to test a system as complicated as seed based random levels, as your feedback will be crucial to the development of this system.

Overall, the next update will solidify Linklight's final look while providing our players with one of our most highly requested features.

We are honestly so excited for you all to be able to see and play the next update of the game when it comes out. This is going to be an amazing way to kick off what we hope will be our last year in Early Access.

Thank you all for continuing to support us.

Highrise Software