It's the monthly update - errr..a bit late!
One of the tricky parts of being a part time dev is that you only get to work on the game part time. With work ramping up near the end of the year I've not had as much time to work on the game as I liked.
On the plus side I was able to get some patches out for the game (so they've actually been live for a few weeks now) but I'm only just not getting around to the update.
Freezing Game Fix
One of the bugs that I've been trying to track down for a long time is when the game randomly freezes when playing against the CPU. Locally I almost never got the issue, but I did get a number of people sending screenshots using the in game feedback tool. Plus Magerama left a review mentioning the freezes as well.
I was finally able to track down what the cause was. It turns out that it was the timing of animations when using abilities. You see, the game processes abilities and items as code that runs exactly the same for the human player, the CPU or for offline/online. When you use an ability or an item it plays out some animations, and then once it's done tells the CPU player it's ready for it to take its turn. It seemed there was a bug that affected nearly all the abilities and items where the CPU would start playing it's turn before the animations had actually completed - this caused the scene to start to get out of sync turn over turn. What was especially tricky about the bug is that you don't notice it right away, it's only once several of these animations have been cut off and the scene drifts further out of sync that the game runs the risk of freezing.
Hopefully this resolves this issue and the game should be much more stable.
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I've also added some extra puzzles. I'll be spending a bit more time adding in some more puzzles over the next few weeks, trying to get that number up a bit. I added a new one for this update. They are surprisingly hard to make - I originally thought they would be a lot quicker, but it takes a lot of trial and error to figure out some good challenges. I think I need to come up with a better way of making them, haha. But yeah the next update should have a bunch more.
That's it for now, a bit of a small update!