Tidalis:0.907 Beta Release
Contents
Notes From The Producer: July 8, 2010
Still moving ever closer to being ready for release. These changes to the visuals/sounds of combos, and the visuals/mechanics of block marking, are definitely a pretty notable improvement. Being able to "claim victory" on levels that have no win conditions is also nice, so that your Endless game can still eventually go on the scoreboard when you decide to stop playing.
Beyond this, lots of other various behind-the-scenes stuff has been going on today, that you'll see more directly soon. Nothing all that exciting, just all the million little things that go into making a release actually possible—more setup stuff with distributors, distributor-specific game images and copy, all that fun stuff.
Getting very close now! July 16 is only 8 days away.
--Christopher M. Park
New & Updated Levels
- Adventure cutscenes 113 and 114 have been completed.
New & Updated Art/Music/Sound
- When combos are achieved, different fanfares are now played, and visual effects for the combo are now also displayed. This makes it far more obvious when combos are even occurring, and makes it feel a lot more rewarding.
- The flashing highlight on blocks that resulted from Auto Marking of blocks was giving a headache to some folks on the team, so we decided to make it a slower-flashing small "M" in the bottom right corner of auto-marked blocks. You can still turn this feature off either way if you don't like it, but this should retain the usefulness of that feature without bothering people.
- The manual marking now uses a similar small flashing "M1", "M2", and "M3" to identify marked blocks.
Gameplay Additions
Gameplay Updates
- Manual marking is now by block, rather than by tile. So if a block moves between tiles while you are away doing something else, hitting the "back to mark" button now takes you right to the new position of the block.
New Level Editor Features
Misc
- Added Claim Victory button for levels that cannot be lost (zen with no time limit and no special objectives, etc) so that those scores can be counted for high scores levels, etc.
- Fast Forward and Ultra Fast Forward buttons no longer show on brainteaser, zen, and light-up levels.
- Find Internet Games made significantly more robust in handling errors.
Bugfixes
- In previous prereleases the last two keybinds were being cut off the bottom of the keybinding configuration screen. Fixed.
- Fixed a bug with the heat glow weather effect that was causing "ghosting" in cutscenes, and which was eating up a ton of extra CPU/GPU during the heat glow scenes, anyway. The new effect is vastly more efficient and bug-free, but looks a slight bit different.
