Tidalis:0.852 Beta Release

Notes From The Producer: June 14, 2010

We're getting on down to the point where we are very close to the submission to PAX 10 (that will be tomorrow afternoon EST for sure, no matter what), so we're doing two releases today. This is the first, and then we'll have another one in another 5-7 hours or so, depending on how much more we have to fix.

We're also to that point where we're just really working on things that we can comfortably fix or polish without breaking something else worse, heh. So the fades I had wanted to do between levels, etc, will have to wait a few weeks because otherwise those will likely just add instability and bugs in the short term.

If you have a chance to look at the game, and find anything wrong with it that we need to fix before PAX 10, we're always looking for that sort of thing! Thanks!

--Christopher M. Park

New & Updated Levels

• A number of the levels in the game have been tweaked in slight ways to make them more pleasing or slightly more polished.

• A new demo puzzle 1-3 has been added.

• All of the levels in adventure mode now have names.

• All of the cutscenes have been updated to use the new character voices and other sound effects as appropriate.

New & Updated Art/Music/Sound

• The Tidal Wreckage and Open Plains themes have been updated with new animations and details.

• Gibberish voice effects have been added in for all seven of the characters in the game, to be used during cutscenes.

Gameplay Additions

• Added keybinds for 2 additional types of mark, defaulting to N and B (current manual mark defaults to M), and 3 binds for moving the secondary (keyboard) cursor to the tile last marked by the corresponding mark type (defaults to L, K, and J, corresponding the mark types defaulting to M, N, and B respectively). Please note that we will NOT be providing a way to move the mouse cursor to the last marked tile because we are not aware of a cross-platform-safe method of doing so.

Gameplay Updates

• When using smart-drag mode, the quasi "locked" blocks are now dimmed slightly.

• Previously, when a block hit another block it always would reset its acceleration to zero, which was problematic in various circumstances. Now, when a block hits another block that is moving at a slower rate than itself (but more than zero), it matches acceleration with the other block instead of resetting itself to zero.

• The fall rate underwater was already slower than normal, but now it has been made even a bit slower than before, to really make it feel more like falling in water.

• Blocks that are directly placed into a level via the editor no longer go through a formation animation if they have one (this mostly applies to bubble blocks).

New Level Editor Features

• A new, optional SoundOnShow attribute on TextSegment properties allows for people creating cutscenes to add in sound effects for speech, events, etc.

Misc

• Sampler and Puzzles guided tour buttons now go to the level set menus for those, rather than to the first level in the set.

• Added confirm to Restart Guided Tour button.

• Added "Toggle All" buttons for the custom game menu's special block and usable item toggle sets.

• The descriptions of the game styles, special blocks, and items have all been improved.
  • In the case of some of the special blocks, they have actually been renamed to remove the parenthetical addendums that had previously been used on them.

• Theme Editor drawing of sprite bounding boxes under the mouse cursor now only shows for sprites in the selected layer. If you hold the control key it will ignore the only-selected-layer rule.

Bugfixes

• Fixed bug where level-preview tooltip was not displaying a level title if the level's display name was blank (it should show the filename in this case).

• Fixed bug where single-select dropdowns inside a scrolling area (like the Keybindings screen) would be too tall and make it impossible to reach the bottom of the list.

• Fixed bug where esc/menu-ing out of the tutorials if you got there from the Tutorial guided tour button would put you in the wrong window.

• Fixed a couple of unhandled exceptions relating to trying to edit themes, layers, or sprites while testing a theme.

• Previously, the objectives display for puzzles were still stating that the objective was to clear all blocks even if there were other objectives that were overriding that. Fixed.

• Previously, if a theme had an image that failed to load for whatever reason, then it wouldn't load the level. Fixed.

• Previously, sometimes the View Completion Stats and Next Level buttons were showing through to the main menu. Fixed.

• Fixed bug where some parts of the code recognized guided tour stage 1 but not stage 2.

• Fixed bug where restart button was not always pausing the board during the confirmation popup.

• Made suffix label on initial-settings window normal font to avoid eye-strain.

• Fixed bug where sampler set was not always considered available-in-trial-mode.

• Previously, the tooltips on the adventure map and the level listings were not showing the name of levels if the level name was coming from the filename rather than an explicitly-set display name. Fixed.

• Fixed minor visual bug where saved adventure icons were not aligned quite right on the buttons.

• The icons in the before level and game over popup windows are now properly centered.
  • Thanks to Ixiohm for reporting.

• A number of other visual fixes have been made to the before level popup window.

Internal Programming Notes

Tidalis