It's the monthly update - and it's just one update away from the full release.
*air horns* *confetti* *air horns*
Puzzle Mode
A new mode Puzzle Mode has been added to the game. It's in preview right now, so there's only 4 levels. I probably wont have all the puzzles done for the full release, but I'm hoping to at least get enough in there that people will feel they got enough content in the game they paid for. I'll be working on getting more puzzles into the game for the months after the full release.
The puzzle mode went through so. many. iterations. I originally wanted something that was more like a programming puzzle, a bit like a zach-like style game, where you had a tile in and a tile out, and you had to use your tiles available to get that score. This didn't pan out the way I hoped. Then I moved it closer to the mode the game has now, but each turn had its own score to reach in order to keep progressing. The intention was to give the player more of an idea if they were on track to win, or if they need to rethink their approach. While this helped the player solve the puzzle in smaller steps, it made the puzzle solutions less flexible, which I didn't like. I even tried a version where you start with a tile already played on the board, and you actually place all the other tiles around it in a single turn, but it was hard to explain how this mode worked.
So, I just went back to the simplest version. It might not be the fanciest design wise, but it's probably the version most likely to not run into some critical design issue.
Updated AI
A while back I introduced a smarter "MCTS" style AI to the game, which allowed the AI to make better moves, but it usually takes a few seconds for it to properly crunch through the options. For the early game I didn't want players waiting around while this was processing, but when I set the MCTS algorithm to play very quickly (under 0.5 seconds), it wasn't much different from it playing randomly. So what I've done is split the AI in two:
For CPU difficulty less than or equal to 5: Simple AI is used which looks at the best option available this turn. Does not look ahead more than the current turn.
For CPU difficulty more than 5: MCTS AI is used, starting at a 1 second wait time and increasing up to 4 seconds.
I also tweaked how the AI uses abilities and items, but there's still more work to be done there.
Bug Fixes
A few issues with abilities crashing the game have been fixed. I had a few people submit some bug tickets using the in game feedback tool (Thanks!), so hopefully those should be fixed now.
I also made some tweaks to how the game loads assets when the game starts - this should in theory improve the load time between scenes.
What's Next
I'm in the process of updating the final ability and item icons. Once those are done, I'll probably be spending a week or two doing final bug hunting. The plan is to get the game fully on sale after that in the first half of October.
I'm not nervous, no not at all hahahahahhahahaa.........