Splurgemas Major Bugfix Patch

Merry Splurgemas everyone! I hope you're all thoroughly enjoying your holidays (personally I'm really loving the time off uni). With Christmas right around the corner, I've finally finished work on a massive patch that fixes all (currently known) gamebreaking bugs, glitches and crashes in the game. This is a massive update, as before the game was pretty unstable and in my opinion close to unplayable, but with this patch (hopefully) players won't have to worry about random crashes or softlocks or anything of the sorts. This update doesn't come with much content, only adding a new music track, new Steam achievements and some minor visual changes.

Notable Changes:

• Added a new song that plays during decay

• Added 2 new Steam achievements, "No Skill Issue Here" and "Nihilism"

• Added the ability to tie when all players get eliminated simultaneously or two or more players have the same score (alternate gamemode)

• Overhauled the game's logic system, allowing for much smoother and more consistent gameplay

• Slightly modified animations for tile deletion and hovering

• Like 100 bug fixes but idk i forgot to write them all down lol

Logic Changes:

Before this update, there was no central 'system' that controlled tiles beyond the initial creation of the game. Tiles would dynamically update each other at the starts/ends of their animations. Unsurprisingly, this was very bad. Probably the biggest issue to come out of this was the wild client synchronisation problems, which would often result in animations pausing/getting stuck in an endless loop, and thus bricking the game. Now, all logic is stored in a master array which the tiles can access but not change. Their animations are now purely visual and don't affect gameplay in anyway (as they should be). Every turn, the tile manager looks at the master array and the next turn and calculates all tile progresses and updates, storing the information in a series of lists, before executing them over given time intervals. Visually, this looks almost the same as before (albeit smoother). However, much less information needs to be transferred between the host and the client, so there are essentially no issued created by the potential of lag or delay. Admittedly, this is how I originally should've coded the game, but like this is my first ever sold game so I'm hoping you can cut me some slack :)

Full Release Info:

The Full Release, or 1.0 is intended to be the next and final major update to Splurge, taking the game out of early access. I haven't got a timeframe on when this update might be ready (I literally have done no actual work on this update so far). The update will be centred around two new features: powerups and AI/CPU players. Powerups are intended to add another layer of depth, complexity, and uniqueness to the game, and computer players will enable the ability to play solo so you don't need to brutally force your friends to buy the game so you can actually play. As well as this, I plan to do some major overhauls to the graphics of the game and also a lot of the soundtrack. I will have some devlogs releasing over the course of the development process so stay tuned for those.