Tidalis:0.410 Beta Release

Notes From The Producer: May 13, 2010

So, much shorter turnaround on this one than 0.409, to say the least. ;) Two releases in one day! First time that's happened for Tidalis, though it's happened many times with AI War in the past. Mainly because AI War was at a more mature state when that was happening, and Tidalis is now getting into that sort of area.

As noted in the 0.409 thread, there was an issue with a lot of the content being in the wrong folder there initially, but 0.410 fixes those problems without your needing to do anything—still getting used to the new Tidalis update process, apologies.

Anyway, even if there hadn't been the issue with the 0.409 install, I was planning on doing this new beta release anyway—it's absolutely chock full of new stuff: 3 new special blocks, and 2 new game modes, and they are all really notably cool. Enjoy!

--Christopher M. Park

Gameplay Additions

• New Crystalizer special block.
  • Complete a chain next to the bubble, and it will shatter. When it shatters, all of the directly-adjacent blocks are also destroyed and turned into usable items (with a few exceptions, such as the walls).

• New Flipper (180) special block.
  • Streams that hit this big flipper are ricocheted back in the direction from whence they came at double speed. Can only be destroyed by dropping out of the bottom of the well.
  • Unlike the small flipper, there is only one direction version of this, since it always reflects 180 degrees either way.

• New Flipper (45) special block.
  • Streams that hit this little flipper are ricocheted at a forty-five degree angle at double speed. Can only be destroyed by dropping out of the bottom of the well.
  • There are two versions of this block: one that is clockwise, and one that is counterclockwise. They reflect streams at the angles you would expect based on the movement of their rotors.

• New Light-Up game mode
  • Same as Zen mode, but instead of scoring based on cleared blocks, you Toggle a background tile's activation every time you clear a block on that tile. When the entire board is Activated at once, then you get score for how few moves it took you!
  • Special thanks to jkefka for suggesting the base mechanic at work here.

• New Trampoline game mode
  • Same as Normal mode, except that streams can only go 1 space at first. However, when a stream hits another block, the lifetime goes up by one space, so longer chains mean longer lifetimes that could let a stream cross the entire board. Merging reactions also causes the lifetime to increase.

Bugfixes

• Various fixes to restart/revive behavior on quick games and custom games.

• Playing a puzzle with special objectives in multi-well mode now displays two separate lists of objective progress description (since progress is not cumulative between boards in puzzle mode).

Internal Programming Notes

• Added BlockColorDictionary and SpecialBlockDictionary to UsableItemDefinition for quick and efficient lookup of those types of blocks.

• Added the ability to put _Inverse as a suffix on the name of a special block type, and to thus have it run its animation backwards from the main special block's type (without extra asset creation, RAM use, etc). Very useful for the inverted FlipperSmall version, and may come in handy other times in the future, as well.

Tidalis