Tidalis:0.990 Beta Release

Notes From The Producer: July ??, 2010

--Christopher M. Park

New & Updated Levels

• 1 new brainteaser has been added.

• A great many brainteasers have been tweaked in at least a minor fashion (mostly themes being set).

• The adventure map has been greatly updated as far as where its hidden secrets go, and there are now vastly more hidden secrets in place.

New & Updated Art/Music/Sound

• Tweaked the visuals of the volcano theme.

• The cavern no longer uses the fancy water effect it had before, but it now runs without lag even on middling and older hardware, and uses 5x less video memory. It was the only theme to use so much vram, so now it's well within the bounds of what the other themes use.

Gameplay Updates

• Blocks are now considered dropped (for score purposes and purposes of the objectives) as soon as they are 1 pixel into the board. Previously the block had to be entirely into the board.

• During network co-op play, whenever one player wins and one player loses, the win counteracts the loss. Given that the games are intentionally running slightly out of sync with one another, this is the only fair (and non-frustrating) way to resolve conflicts of this sort.
  • When playing VS modes over the network, it is possible to get a situation where both players lose. In this unlikely sort of situation, the match is simply a draw. There's no co-op counterpart to a draw, however, so it defaults to winning when in doubt. These circumstances are extremely rare aside from during co-op brainteasers, anyway.

• During co-op brainteasers in general (local or networked), whenever one of the two players wins, it now considers it a win. This is, after all, the goal of that mode -- for the two players to solve the brainteaser together, on at least one of their boards.

Misc

• When you are adjusting the music and sounds sliders in the settings window, it now adjusts the music/sound volumes in realtime so that you can hear the changes and decide what you like. If you hit cancel, it cancels the changes, as before. Whenever the sound slider is moved, it plays the eater chomp sound effect now to be a preview sound.

• The requirements for the block clear gold level achievements have been reduced significantly to make them remotely possible for most people.

• During network play, neither player is now allowed to see the board until both players have finished loading the board and can both see it at once. This prevents any advantage from being the one to accept a request for a level, rather than being the one to suggest it.

• During network play, players are now shown a status on start of what the other player is doing -- still loading the board, or viewing the starting screen, etc. The game doesn't start until both players have finished looking at the starting screen, if there is one, so this eliminates any confusion as to why the level hasn't yet started.

• Themes are now reset to their initial fresh state whenever a theme is changed or a level is loaded. This prevents any minor glitches that occur from lasting until the program is restarted, and instead should make any problem only ever last until the theme is next loaded. Not that we expect many such issues, but just to be on the safe side.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug wherein during network play the players could start an adventure, then suggest a brainteaser level from the menu to have that brainteaser automatically reveal the hidden node if it was hidden in the adventure.

• Fixed a bug that was allowing the buttons beside the game board (pause, revive, etc) to visually show through to the menus after a game loss.

Internal Programming Notes

Tidalis