Tidalis:0.416 Beta Release

Notes From The Producer: May 22, 2010

Well, this is another feature-packed release. Especially for a Saturday!

The four modes that are included in this could not be more different: wind mode is another streams-physics-manipulating mode, limited streams mode is an entirely new sort of brain-bending-via-having-to-find-certain-sorts-of-paths mode, jumping beans mode is another ultra-action-heavy mode where advanced click-happy players can really set up some weird chains, and eater defense mode is actually a strategy-style mode that could almost be called Tower Defense in terms of its genre.

Yeah, lots of new stuff here, for sure. ;)

--Christopher M. Park

Gameplay Additions

• New Eater Defense mode.
  • Eaters frequently fall from the top of the well, while players try to defend their golden apples by throwing regular apples in between them and the hungry hordes. The more golden apples you have currently in your board, the higher your score—but lose all your golden apples, and you lose!

• New Jumping Bean mode.
  • Blocks that are clicked will jump two blocks upwards if they are not already falling or jumping, and you can trigger reactions out of blocks at any time. This allows for a wide variety of timing-based stunts, setting up chains that would otherwise be impossible.

• New Limited Streams mode.
  • In this difficult mode, there are "stream credits" per board. For every chain completed, if there are more than 5 blocks in the chain then credits are added; if there are fewer than 6 blocks in the chain, credits are removed.
  • Chains that are part of a combo reaction count neither for nor against your stream credits. There is a maximum of 20 stream credits that can be stockpiled. When a chain causes the number of credits to fall to zero, the game is lost for that board.

• New Wind mode.
  • Gusts of wind periodically come through, blowing streams either left or right.

• New Apple (Golden) special block.
  • Can only be cleared by being eaten by eaters or pit monsters. Otherwise indestructible even to other specials. Also destroys the thing that ate it when it gets eaten. In Eater Defense mode, protect these in order to avoid losing.

• New Safety Pin item.
  • Pops a single water balloon, water fish, or bubble block.
  • Only available in puzzles or as part of Water mode (and in Water mode, this only appears on difficulties lower than 5).

• New Wind Burst item.
  • For 30 seconds, a strong gust of wind will blow all the streams in the well towards the side of the well closest to where you click.

Gameplay Updates

• Apples and Turnips now float in water.

• Apples and Golden Apples now kill Eaters and Pit Monsters that consume them.

Misc

• The Edit Board Details window now has two columns so that all of the Game Styles will fit in it.

• On Zen and Light-up modes blocks now fall freely during active combos, to make that smoother.

• Fleshed out collectibles awarded for each victory in adventure mode.

• Basic skeletal implementation of achievements, still need more visual feedback and of course the achievements themselves.

Bugfixes

• Fixed bug in in-game help screen (and some other windows using scrollable areas) where toolitps would show based on the original positions of the icons rather than where they actually were due to scrolling.

• Fixed bug where scenes using a theme with precipitation would result in rapidly changing precipitation directions.

• Fixed stream travel distance stats to properly divide by the sim scale.

• Previously, the move counts were not showing properly per-board when there were multiple boards. Fixed.

• Fixed a bug with the effective width of the game boards not scaling properly when the game boards were shrunk.

Internal Programming Notes

• It is now possible to have puzzle-only (and by extension special-mode-only) items, same as it has been possible to do that for a long while with special blocks.

Tidalis