The monthly update - which is actually a bit past a month - is ready!
Lots of updates this month as the game makes a final few sprints towards release. It's not completely done yet, but it's getting close.
A new playable character Tommo has been added to the game.
Tommo is the owner of the Cafe that the game takes place in, and appears in the story in a few places. With Tommo come three new abilities to try out (and yep I'm still rockin the mspaint) and is the last playable character to be added to the game. Well, there might be one more hidden character that you will unlock eventually by completing the story...
Afternoon Sun: Increase a tiles face value by 1.
Coldsnap: Place a Trap which which activates when a tile is placed on top. Stun the tile until the next round. Regain 2 energy when activated.
Skipping Stone: Target any tile. All tiles that you own with that value are discarded. Gain 20 points for each tile.
Added story mode up to day 15
You can now play up to day 15 (well technically the end of day 14) in the story mode. You'll get to the know the characters, unlock abilities and there's a few challenge mode rounds in there as well (where the rules change in some way for a single match).
The story mode is chugging along, however I still need to do tweak it some more. I'll probably be continuing to improve the dialog week over week and shuffle some things around, but save files wont be affected by this.
Added ability Inventory
As you proceed through the story mode, you'll eventually collect all the ability cards in the game. This allows you to pick and choose which abilities you take into a match. Once you collect your fourth ability this screen will unlock. I think the general UI for it is ok, but I still need to add some better 'selected' highlights around the abilities, like some sparkly particle effects or something. I think it looks a tad bland at the moment. Also the ordering of the abilities doesn't make a whole lot of sense right now - I think grouping them by cost or type might be a nicer way of presenting it.
Level Awards
Now when you complete a level, you will receive a rank depending on how fast you cleared the level. The awards are Gold, Silver, Bronze and Miss (for when you don't win), and the number of turns you need to win depends on the matches target score. As an extra perk, this now also allows you to replay completed levels, which was previously missing.
Results Screen
Related to the awards, there is now a game results screen at the end of a match. It will give you a quick summary of what contributed to your final points. You can also click the yellow arrow and see your opponents stats as well. If you are wondering what you need to do to earn a certain medal, you can hover over the info icon and it will let you know.
Whirlpool ability bug fix
Big thanks to Bigpower letting me know of a bug with the Whirlpool ability. It seems that when using it, the game locks up, which surprisingly isn't by design! It turns out the issue was as silly as me forgetting to include the particle effect in the assets being loaded in the level after I shuffled around some resources. Whoops.
If you notice any bugs or have any feedback, the in game feedback form has been working great! Thanks to everyone who has reported bugs I've missed.
Related to this -
Next release will probably be a Spring Cleaning Update
Even though it's not spring yet. As the game gets closer to being done, it's easy to start introducing bugs as you rush to get that last 10% done. As such, it's been a while since I went through and did a good QA pass on the whole game. For next release I'll probably just be focusing entirely on doing a solid bug pass through the whole code base and try and get things as stable as possible for the final version.
Tangent: I still don't know what to call the energy you spend on abilities in the game should be. Should it just be called energy, or should it be called Mana? I think I refer to it a few ways in the games text right now, but I've never been 100% sure on what to call it. Hmmm.
Ok that's it for this update -
Cheers!