This has been a short week for development due to the Tuesday release and the Thanksgiving holiday in the US. We still have some good things for you though!
Most importantly we’ve been working on fixing a handful of critical bugs. Fortunately we were able to catch them quickly and put out fixes the same day. We’re in “earliest access” so there will be bugs, but we’ll try as hard as we can to make sure they don’t interfere with anyone’s enjoyment.
Our plan is to update Steam with a new stable version of the game every week. However, if you’re willing to put up with a few extra bugs, you can get daily updates from the Steam “beta” branch. To switch to using the beta branch, all you have to do is right click on Future Perfect in Steam, select Properties and then choose it on the Betas tab.
Platform Automator
Dushan added automator scripts for the platforms to help make building levels easier:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8N7Ybhop6M
The artwork for these modular platform pieces was in the initial release, but they had to be manually placed one-by-one. Now that they’re hooked up with an automator it’s much easier; you can drag out straight paths and the automator does all the work of placing the pieces and connecting them when they intersect.
We’ll talk more about these later, but simply put automators are Lua scripts that allow you to control the editor. We’ve added them to do procedural level building, but we think there will be lots of other uses for them as well.
Sweeper of Mines
Dushan wrote up a guide explaining how scripting in Future Perfect works with an example Minesweeper-like game. The tutorial will be posted soon, but Sweeper of Mines is already up on the Steam Workshop:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8N7Ybhop6M
You can play it by subscribing to it from the Workshop website, or by choosing it from the “Find Games” panel in the main menu in-game. Once it’s downloaded it will show up in list when you select “Start Game”.
Create Asset Menu
We found the simple dropdown list for creating a new asset had some usability problems, so we revised the interface for creating new assets:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcs2deIjKdA
We’re going to constantly iterate and improve on the user interface to make things as easy and clear as possible. Feedback is very useful, so if you have any suggests be sure to post them in the Future Perfect forums, either here on Steam or on our website.