Tidalis:1.000 Official Release

Notes From The Producer: July 14, 2010

And at last... here we are! The 1.0 version is now complete for the game. This is several days in advance of our official "launch day," which will be the 16th, but you can play with this early if you are so inclined.

Our various distribution partners all need advance time to make sure that they can do their final testing of the game and/or so that they can get it onto their platforms properly. So that's why the game is done so well in advance of when it is actually released. Did you know that with retail releases, it's often a month or two of lead time? Think about it—that's needed so that the game can go through manufacturing, etc. That's why often there is a 1.001 patch for games right on the release day, because the development team had an extra spare couple of months on their hands and found some issues after it went to manufacturing.

In our case, we'll still be keeping an eye out for any issues over the next few days, but we have no outstanding bugs that we know of at the moment. If something comes up, we'll do a 1.001 patch ourselves, but this has been through a ton of testing this week and hopefully nothing serious has slipped through.

I'll post something more celebratory on Friday when we're making our "launch day" news posts, but for now this is a major milestone we've reached! It still hasn't fully sunk in for us yet. ;) Still a very busy time, though, with distributors, press, and so forth all needing various things now. But it's a good sort of busy.

--Christopher M. Park

New & Updated Levels

• 4 new brainteasers have been added to the game, bringing the total to 69.

• 15 new special block tutorials have been added, and 12 of the existing ones were updated.
  • The special block tutorials section now includes tutorials now for every kind of special block, and sun and moon, and white blocks. In all, this is now a total of 28 special block tutorials.
  • If you're not a fan of tutorials, bear in mind that these are exceedingly optional. Think of them as a resource for if you need the extra help on a specific special block, not as something you have to sit through to enjoy the game.

• Adventure levels 24, 46, 48, 50, 53, and 54 have had their difficulty fine-tuned.

• Basic tutorial 9 has been tweaked, as have advanced tutorials 3 and 10.

New & Updated Art/Music/Sound

• The "monkey dude" in the rainy mud flat theme and the last area theme has been made to just twitch slightly every so often, rather than shaking constantly. The motion was bothering a few folks.

Gameplay Updates

• Water balloons no longer pop as soon as they are on the bottommost row of a board. Since blocks can be made to fall on top of them and pop them, this is not necessary (unlike with glass). This allows water balloons to be placed on the bottom row of boards in puzzles or similar.

Misc

• Two new folders have been created in the Puzzles section: My Puzzles and Downloaded Puzzles. These are just empty folders that players can organize their levels in, but players can also create new folders through the OS file system if they so desire.

• The windowed width and height now default to a maximum of 1280x768, regardless of how much larger the desktop of the player is. The windowed width and height can still be increased or decreased from there, but this makes the default more comfortable.

• There are now tooltips on the windowed width and height textboxes noting that the recommended width is 1280, and the recommended height is 768.

• Added a new tooltip to the fullscreen refresh option in settings:
  • Leave at 0 to have the game select the highest refresh rate your monitor supports. If you select a value your monitor does not support, it will also default to the highest supported refresh in those circumstances, too.

• Instead of directly launching the download updates process, the updates button now launches an Updater Window, with a few options and some explanations. In rare cases where the external updater tool cannot be launched directly, this window explains how to run that manually. Also, it includes a button for attempting to directly launch the external updater from within the application without doing any downloads, in case folks need to do (or want to test) that.
  • Usually the game can launch the external updater just fine at this point, but in cases where for whatever reason that fails, this helps out. Specifically, on some older operating systems (mainly Mac OSX Tiger), the game is unable to launch the external updater at all.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug in recent versions that was not allowing capitalization of filenames to be added because it was detecting a rename conflict.

• Fixed a bug that was causing brainteasers to detect that no victory was possible if there were less than 3 sun or moon blocks, but yet still enough of them combined that victory would actually be possible.

• Fixed a bug where the game could crash in various circumstances if a level file was locked by an external program, or if it was suddenly missing after having been present.

Internal Programming Notes

Tidalis