Tidalis:0.900 Beta Release

New & Updated Levels

• Adventure levels 77-86 have been added.

• Basic tutorials 2 and 5 have been tweaked.

• Cutscenes 35, 37, 39, and 42 have been added, and 36 and 39 have been updated.

New & Updated Art/Music/Sound

• Segments 10-14 of the adventure map have now been visually polished, which completes the visual polish of the adventure map.

• The Forest and Forest Night themes have been visually polished and animated to a great degree.

• "Static background" versions of all the themes have been added (see below, in Misc).

• The Snowy Lowlands, Windy Mountaintop, and Temple themes have been visually updated.

• There is a new, static intro loading screen, which lets the game load faster before it gets to the fully-animated title menu.

• The "Place Color Block" item images have been updated to be colorblind-friendly.

Gameplay Updates

• Cured blocks no longer turn back into Sick blocks when their score multiplier is triggered. This was too difficult in practice.

• Using the Fast-forward or Ultra-fast-forward buttons/hotkeys now causes a block to immediately fall, so these can be tapped to quickly drop just a single column of blocks.

• There is now a yellow highlight that fades in to each column of blocks right before the column gets a block (or blocks) dropped into it. This lets players easily keep tabs, especially in Solitaire mode, on where blocks will next be dropping in.

• Added bi-directional versions of the place-color-block items.

• Clearing an Ice block next to a Cured block will now turn it into a Sick block (uses the same range as the direction-lock effect).

• Sick Blocks no longer cause a row of blocks to fall in Zen or Light-Up modes.

New Level Editor Features

• When hitting Save and Test on the Theme Editor, it now hides the entire GUI until any button or mouse click is registered.

• The Level Editor now has a "Skip Objectives From Game Styles" option in the Edit Level Details window.
  • If enabled, the enabling of game styles won't cause any literal objectives (win or loss ones) to be added to your level. Normally this option does not need to be enabled, but in specific circumstances with game styles such as Solitaire, it can prove quite helpful.

• The Move Limit slider in the Edit Level Details window has been moved onto the same line with the Distinct Colors slider in order to save space.

• Added Cure Count and Unchar Count objectives.

• There are now FlipX and FlipY commands that can be used in the sprite keyframing scripting.

Misc

• Added mouseover highlight to adventure map nodes.

• Added "Use Static Backgrounds" option for those with lower-end hardware and those who just like backgrounds that don't move.

• Normally when there is an unhandled exception, Unity 3D applications just get all weird and buggy-looking. Now Tidalis internally catches these exceptions in a better way, logs them to a permanent UnhandledExceptions.txt error file, pops open a message to show the player, and closes itself. This prevents a lot of confusion -- as well as potential data corruption -- in the fairly rare event that an unhandled exception is encountered.

Bugfixes

• Fixed bug preventing scrolling in the adventure editor.

• Fixed bug that made adventure map scrolling happen at the edge of the screen rather than the edge of the letterboxed area, which is a very different thing on large resolutions.

• Fixed bug with boards with editor-defined special block frequencies, where it was possible for a special type with zero frequency to be placed in the initial population.

• Fixed a couple of bugs with pit monsters that was causing them to jump upwards too fast when eating blocks, and which also was causing them not to play their eating sound effect.

Internal Programming Notes

Tidalis