Lots of interesting updates this month.
Early Access Coming Soon
While Cascade Cafe is not quite ready for Early Access yet, it will be very soon. There's still a small amount of content to do, but it's getting pretty close to done. This will be a pretty big milestone for the development of the game, where there will finally be something to purchase! The Steam demo day starts on June 16, so the game will be put into EA a few days before that.
The demo version of the game will stay up. The multiplayer though will be available in both the demo and the full version, so if you are looking for a free version to send to a friend to play, they can just use the demo link.
The game will probably be in EA for about a month (perhaps less) while I wrap up loose ends in the game. One feature that has been bumped from release to post-release is the challenge/puzzle mode. Being a team of 1 means I had to shift my time to working on the existing features first. Once the game is out and any unknown issues are fixed, I'll switch back to that mode and try and get it completed.
Stage Gimmicks
One feature that's been missing for a while that I'm glad is finally in is stage gimmicks. Each map will contain a few gimmicks to mix up the game a bit. An example of some of these are:
X2 Points are doubled for the rest of this turn.
Reducer Before active tile is scored this turn, receive -30 points.
Relocator After active tile is scored this turn, it is teleported to a random location on the board.
There's a few other ones (6 in total), and they should make the maps have a bit more variety (where as before, apart from the shape, the maps didn't have a whole lot gameplay wise that seperated them). Once the rest of development has been caught up, I might try and add a few more.
New Items
Previously the game only had 3 items in it, which where there more of a proof of concept that anything. The idea with items is to fill in the gaps of abilities that your selected character doesn't have (or in the case of story mode, abilities you didn't take into the match).
They've been designed so that items are always a weaker version of an ability which replaces it. For example, "Lucky Coin" lets you decrease the value of a tile you control, where as ability "Thunderstorm" lets you decrease the value of either players tile.
I won't list them all out here, but I'll just mention that 11 items have been added to the game, which is a fairly big jump.
What's Next
Hmm, considering how much work went into this release, the steam post is kind of short. Coding takes time I guess! Anyway, that's it for this month. The next bits going into the game will probably be Achievements for the full release and the last few days of story mode. It's nearly all done!
Cheers!