RefresherTowel
Member
KEY FEATURES
- PLAY: Challenge yourself with a multitude of unique and difficult deliveries to make!
- AVOID: Many celestial hazards fill your path with death and destruction!
- MASTER: Learn to warp spacetime by flying close to exotic objects, lowering your delivery times!
- COMPETE: Perfect your route for each delivery to climb the leaderboard rankings and crown yourself the best interstellar deliverer!
- BUILD: In-built delivery editor allows you to build your own deliveries for others to try!
Denied!
Spamazon, the local intergalactic delivery company, has hired you to service the Core Quadrant, which has been in sore need of deliveries since the last person doing them was spaghettified in the bowels of a black hole. You'll take on a huge variety of gravity-based puzzles, facing death, destruction, and insanity around every corner, on your quest to become the universe's ultimate deliverer. Plan your paths by thinking about the gravitational potential of each object on your route and figure out the perfect angle and power to launch with so that you will make it to your target planet in one piece.
Spaceslingers in all it's glory
With tons of deliveries waiting to go, you'll need all your wits and nerves of steel to come out the other side alive. Remember, interplanetary delivery is a hard job, but someone's got to do it!
IMAGES
You Ain't Getting Outta This One
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UPDATE LOG
17th November, 2020 (4am AEST)
Spaceslingers is released! It's been a big part of my life for the better part of a year and it's finally out! It's been so much fun being able to show everyone on the board the development of the game and the feedback and encouragement I've found here has helped me immensely as I went through the highs and lows of trying to bring this thing to life. So a big thanks to everyone who participated, even if it was only a like on a status update. Special thanks to @O.Stogden for a lot of support and also going through the scary trials of a release at roughly the same time as me! I hope everyone who gets it enjoys it!
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17th November, 2020 (10:45pm AEST, 5 hours to launch)
The launch is happening tonight (well, tonight for me). It should be available at 10am PST (the Steam page is lying right now) unless I run into trouble launching it at that time, in which case it will be 5pm PST (the Steam page will have retroactively not lied). I'm pretty nervous right now...I dunno how the game's going to run on a bunch of different people's computers, I dunno how people are going to receive the game, etc, etc. Terrifying stuff, to be honest, public judgment always is. But I've done the best I can and I've just gotta let the little bird fly free and hope there aren't any big eagles waiting in the wings, to mix metaphors confusingly. I'm pushing the last pre-launch update to the servers soon and then it's just a bunch of pacing my lounge room or something until 4am rolls around.
Making games has always been a massive interest of mine (I think I share that trait with most people on this forum) and it's been a wild ride going from releasing broken game jam games and abandoning ambitious projects left and right to trying to make a commercial product that I can be proud of. I know that the game isn't going to cater to everyone's tastes, but it was started as a personal project and so it was never aiming for the most commercially successful market or the widest audience. It was aimed at people who love spacey stuff, physics and people who don't particularly like twitchy action games. And I think I've at least somewhat succeeded at hitting that mark. If nothing else, it's definitely the most ambitious project I've taken through to full completion. In fact, I wouldn't say that I've pushed any other "completed" project to anywhere near the same level of "completion" that I have with Spaceslingers. As everyone says, the last 10% of the project is 90% of the work and that maxim held true for this game as well. Getting all those last little bits of polish in was a huge amount of work and I hope that it shows in the final product.
So if you haven't already, and this little devlog has sparked your interest, head over to https://store.steampowered.com/app/1369800/Spaceslingers/ and plop down a wishlist (or a purchase if you're reading this after tonight).
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9th November, 2020
Well...I guess I should've been advertising this before now, but I wasn't 100% sure I'd be able to get past the finish line in time. Now that I'm only 90% sure I won't, I guess the time has come. Launch has been set for 17th of November, 2020 PST (that's 18th of November, 2020 in my upside down fair dinkum Australian time). I'm still in the process of making levels (and lucky, because I literally just came up with a new mechanic), and there's the odd thing here and there that I need to fix up, but as far as I can ascertain, everything seems to be in enough of a working order for me to be able to release this little labour of love in a week and a bit.
It's terrifying and exhilarating to be this close to the finish line. A good 6-7 months of pretty solid work (not particularly long in game development standards, but a long time for me personally) has gone into this little beastie and it definitely holds a piece of my soul within it's bits and bytes.
So yeah, life is stressful, but making games is fun. I hope you guys will enjoy Spaceslingers once it's out there in the wild.
It's terrifying and exhilarating to be this close to the finish line. A good 6-7 months of pretty solid work (not particularly long in game development standards, but a long time for me personally) has gone into this little beastie and it definitely holds a piece of my soul within it's bits and bytes.
So yeah, life is stressful, but making games is fun. I hope you guys will enjoy Spaceslingers once it's out there in the wild.
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5th November, 2020
I've cut the start of this devlog out, as it's long and involves a tragedy revolving around windows breaking itself and locking me out of everything, read it all here: When Windows Breaks Itself...
On a brighter note, I’ve got a lot of updates done to the game, release is getting closer and closer and I’m pushing myself as hard as I can to get everything up to scratch for it. I recently made a new “showcase” gif for the game:
I added a “dilation line” which you can see following the ship above. It shows how much time dilation you underwent (light blue is heavy dilation, pinkish is little dilation). Rejiggered and added a lot of graphical flourishes as well as fixing some more spaghetti code that lies behind the scenes. There’s a lot that’s been done since the last update, but I’ve forgotten most of it due to the terrifying windows ordeal.
On a brighter note, I’ve got a lot of updates done to the game, release is getting closer and closer and I’m pushing myself as hard as I can to get everything up to scratch for it. I recently made a new “showcase” gif for the game:
I added a “dilation line” which you can see following the ship above. It shows how much time dilation you underwent (light blue is heavy dilation, pinkish is little dilation). Rejiggered and added a lot of graphical flourishes as well as fixing some more spaghetti code that lies behind the scenes. There’s a lot that’s been done since the last update, but I’ve forgotten most of it due to the terrifying windows ordeal.
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9th October, 2020
Been working my little fingers to the bone to get this update out before the Steam Autumn Festival started, but I didn't quite get there in time! Regardless it's a pretty substantial update to the behind the scenes stuff. The delivery selection screen has become a lot juicier and most of the spaghetti code I had in there (because I was rushing to get the previous version of the demo submitted to Steam) has been removed and everything is a lot more elegant now. I've also updated the way the game saves, which I hope doesn't break any previous saves people had but I'm pretty sure won't. The game is really starting to come together and there's a bit of competition for the top spot in the leaderboards, I've seen it go back and forth a fair bit so far. Give it a try and see what score you can get: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1369800/Spaceslingers/
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4th October, 2020
Well, here culminates, if not the ending, at least a large portion of my journey towards releasing a commercial game. The demo is on Steam. Download it and play here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1369800/Spaceslingers/
I'm feeling a lot of things right now. Nervous, vulnerable, a lot of imposter syndrome (is it imposter syndrome if you're actually an imposter? My mind says that's what imposter syndrome is but my heart says I'm an imposter), excited, a little nauseous...It turns out that, at least mentally, there's a big difference between uploading a casual build to itch.io saying "thought this game was cute lol might delete ltr", and uploading a demo build to Steam which is meant to showcase a game to potential customers. Even when I've been making non-commercial games for many years. It just resonates in a different spot within your soul. In any case, spaghetti code abounds. Here is an impression of me when someone plays the game:
I had to do a massive crunch to get everything working properly for the Steam festival (though, I somehow doubt it'll actually be worth the crunch), and that crunch came with a number of concessions on clean and efficient code. My plan right now is to slowly update and squeeze out the spaghet before launch, but we all know what happens to the best laid plans...
In any case, I'm excited for people to finally be able to get their hands on the new Spaceslingers. The one that I've been dev-logging about for awhile now but haven't had a playable version of. The one that I've grinded my fingerbones against a keyboard for months to make. The one that I've spent countless hours tweaking and sculpting in the dead of night. The one that has existed only in the shadows of my harddrive until now. The one that I wanted to make.
So, to whomever of my ephemeral and digital friends that play this, I hope you have as much fun playing this as I have had making it. I hope it brings you both the meditative moments of planning and the frustrating drive to complete that I've experienced. I hope it either awakens, or furthers, a love of space and the universe in all it's glory. And I hope you complete your blasted deliveries in record time.
I'm feeling a lot of things right now. Nervous, vulnerable, a lot of imposter syndrome (is it imposter syndrome if you're actually an imposter? My mind says that's what imposter syndrome is but my heart says I'm an imposter), excited, a little nauseous...It turns out that, at least mentally, there's a big difference between uploading a casual build to itch.io saying "thought this game was cute lol might delete ltr", and uploading a demo build to Steam which is meant to showcase a game to potential customers. Even when I've been making non-commercial games for many years. It just resonates in a different spot within your soul. In any case, spaghetti code abounds. Here is an impression of me when someone plays the game:
In any case, I'm excited for people to finally be able to get their hands on the new Spaceslingers. The one that I've been dev-logging about for awhile now but haven't had a playable version of. The one that I've grinded my fingerbones against a keyboard for months to make. The one that I've spent countless hours tweaking and sculpting in the dead of night. The one that has existed only in the shadows of my harddrive until now. The one that I wanted to make.
So, to whomever of my ephemeral and digital friends that play this, I hope you have as much fun playing this as I have had making it. I hope it brings you both the meditative moments of planning and the frustrating drive to complete that I've experienced. I hope it either awakens, or furthers, a love of space and the universe in all it's glory. And I hope you complete your blasted deliveries in record time.
22 September, 2020
Well, this devlog has been a loooong time in the making. I've been hard pressed managing my time between home and the upcoming Steam launch, so I haven't really had time to sit down and write about what I've been doing. But having just completed the new Steam trailer, I feel like I can treat myself to stopping work for the rest of this afternoon and write a bit about what's been going on. So first an (incomplete due to memory) list of things that have been done:
As I said at the start I've just completed the new trailer, it's the one at the very top of this post, which was a genuine slog. I really have to give a big thanks to all the people in this community that gave me ideas and tips during the creation, it wouldn't be half as good as it is without all of your input! Makes me feel warm and fuzzy. The amount of footage I recorded and re-recorded has done my head in and noticing minor issues and having to record whole sequences again just to fix them was pretty frustrating. Video editing is my least favourite part of releasing an indie game and I'm glad that I've got this particular one over and done with.
To go along with the new trailer, I've completely rebranded pretty much all of Spaceslingers promotional content. This keeps everything in sync with the updated graphics of the game, as well as being a breath of fresh air after staring at the same stuff for the last few months. I've also grown artistically over the course of developing the game, as well as gaining a better mastery of the graphics tools I use (Inkscape, GIMP, DaVinci Resolve). I've had a lot of this stuff just waiting on the backburner for when I finish with the new trailer so I can make everything cohesive and consistent at once, rather than having pieces of varying quality and look all over the place, so I'm pretty excited to be able to push it out into the public.
On the coding side of things, physics, juice and polish has been the name of the game in this update. I've been going through everything and adding bounce/juice/tweens/etc wherever I think it fits and I think that that, along with the new physics system, has really added to the feel of the game. I've also been muddling my way through finding the best way to store data when it comes to Steam and I hope that I have it figured out. But it's hard to test properly by myself, so I guess I'll see when other people start playing the demo. I'm also quite intimidated by the idea of having to create a system outside of Steam to hold all the data and high scores once I release on other platforms, so you might be seeing some posts by me after the Steam launch as I try to figure out online databasing and best methods for storage and retrieval, etc. It's not something I've ever done before.
That's about it, I think. This update has been the culmination of nearly two months of solid work and I'm feeling pretty good about it.
- Complete graphical overhaul of the game.
- To go along with above, a complete graphical overhaul of the promotional materials, including a new logo (Some people were unhappy with the previous font used for the logo, so here's to you folks ):
- Added in proper physics. Before I had it so that you hit something and you kinda just bounced off it randomly, but now I've gone in and added juice to the collisions and also made the smaller bodies react appropriately to your collisions, which has been a lot of fun and also made the game a lot more entertaining.
- Added in a 'ghost system' that displays all of your previous attempts upon completion of a level.
- Reworked and updated the scoring system (although it currently only functions within the Steam eco-system, something I'll have to fix before the release date for other platforms).
- Completely overhauled delivery selection screen, with a lot of 'bouncy bouncy' tweening going on.
- Reworked the code behind the scenes involving the delivery editor, which helps everything function smoother and (hopefully) has led to no (or less) bugs compared to before.
- Reworked the tutorial so that there's more of a step-by-step process involved, rather than just a "free play" area that had consequence free flying (which it was before).
- Added in a tips system for when you're dying a lot on a delivery (currently is not customised to the specific delivery, so it's more "general advice" but that may change in the future).
- Added in comedic criticism from your corporate overlords when you fail a delivery.
As I said at the start I've just completed the new trailer, it's the one at the very top of this post, which was a genuine slog. I really have to give a big thanks to all the people in this community that gave me ideas and tips during the creation, it wouldn't be half as good as it is without all of your input! Makes me feel warm and fuzzy. The amount of footage I recorded and re-recorded has done my head in and noticing minor issues and having to record whole sequences again just to fix them was pretty frustrating. Video editing is my least favourite part of releasing an indie game and I'm glad that I've got this particular one over and done with.
To go along with the new trailer, I've completely rebranded pretty much all of Spaceslingers promotional content. This keeps everything in sync with the updated graphics of the game, as well as being a breath of fresh air after staring at the same stuff for the last few months. I've also grown artistically over the course of developing the game, as well as gaining a better mastery of the graphics tools I use (Inkscape, GIMP, DaVinci Resolve). I've had a lot of this stuff just waiting on the backburner for when I finish with the new trailer so I can make everything cohesive and consistent at once, rather than having pieces of varying quality and look all over the place, so I'm pretty excited to be able to push it out into the public.
On the coding side of things, physics, juice and polish has been the name of the game in this update. I've been going through everything and adding bounce/juice/tweens/etc wherever I think it fits and I think that that, along with the new physics system, has really added to the feel of the game. I've also been muddling my way through finding the best way to store data when it comes to Steam and I hope that I have it figured out. But it's hard to test properly by myself, so I guess I'll see when other people start playing the demo. I'm also quite intimidated by the idea of having to create a system outside of Steam to hold all the data and high scores once I release on other platforms, so you might be seeing some posts by me after the Steam launch as I try to figure out online databasing and best methods for storage and retrieval, etc. It's not something I've ever done before.
That's about it, I think. This update has been the culmination of nearly two months of solid work and I'm feeling pretty good about it.
3rd August, 2020
I've been doing a bunch of stuff: revamping the level editor, rejiggering the level selection screen, reformatting the way in which levels are stored, etc. There's been a huge amount of changes behind the scenes. It's now possible to create different Cosmos' (Cosmii?) and save them to disk, making them easily shareable. There's also a slick new interface to make that process as easy as possible. I haven't gotten around to it yet, but the next thing I'll be working on in the level editor is adding in a way to load other people's cosmos in to your game (I mean, the code is there, just not the GUI capability). Doing this basically required an entire rewrite of the way I was saving levels, as well as a bit of jiggering with file code that I've never done before, so it was a learning experience and I have no idea if what I ended up doing is in any way "industry standard" but it seems to work fine (for now...).
Being able to create different Cosmos' created a kind of cascade effect, where I then had to completely redo the level selection screen. This was fun, but also quite time consuming. I wanted the level selection to feel more like a place in a universe, rather than a list of names, so I've changed it into a physical place in space, where you can select galaxies and then select systems within those galaxies. It's a bit nicer I think, but I'm still not done with it, it's kind of barebones right now and some things need repositioning and some buttons/information needs to be added in, but it's coming along quite nicely (I've been swapping back and forth between the level editor and level select as I've been working which has made progress on both go half as fast, but allowed me to tune it better to what I need as problems arose).
On top of that, I've also been working hard at adding "life" to the game. Apparently, life comes exclusively from particles as that's what I've been working on. I redid the particle effects for all the major celestial bodies and I've still got some more things that I want to add particles to, but so far it's really beautified the game. A lot of this was done to try to make screenshots of the game pop more because that's literally the only thing people pay attention to when looking for games (and I'm pretty sure calling your game a puzzle game is a special kind of death knell). So making it as pretty as possible is important. Here's a video showing the things I've added so far:
I've also created a blog where I'll be posting updates, dev-logs, anything related to the game. You can find it here: Spaceslingers Blog
Being able to create different Cosmos' created a kind of cascade effect, where I then had to completely redo the level selection screen. This was fun, but also quite time consuming. I wanted the level selection to feel more like a place in a universe, rather than a list of names, so I've changed it into a physical place in space, where you can select galaxies and then select systems within those galaxies. It's a bit nicer I think, but I'm still not done with it, it's kind of barebones right now and some things need repositioning and some buttons/information needs to be added in, but it's coming along quite nicely (I've been swapping back and forth between the level editor and level select as I've been working which has made progress on both go half as fast, but allowed me to tune it better to what I need as problems arose).
On top of that, I've also been working hard at adding "life" to the game. Apparently, life comes exclusively from particles as that's what I've been working on. I redid the particle effects for all the major celestial bodies and I've still got some more things that I want to add particles to, but so far it's really beautified the game. A lot of this was done to try to make screenshots of the game pop more because that's literally the only thing people pay attention to when looking for games (and I'm pretty sure calling your game a puzzle game is a special kind of death knell). So making it as pretty as possible is important. Here's a video showing the things I've added so far:
I've also created a blog where I'll be posting updates, dev-logs, anything related to the game. You can find it here: Spaceslingers Blog
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22nd July, 2020
Well, after making the trailer and getting some feedback on it, I've launched my Steam page. Probably a solid 2 weeks worth of work purely devoted to getting everything up and running with that. It's a nerve-wracking kinda thing, as we all know that something like 90% of games (especially indie games) make basically no money, but as I said in my last dev-log, I'm more interested in the experience rather than the cash, just hoping to make back enough to cover the steam fee and maybe a potential future steam fee or two. If you're interested in the game, I'd encourage you to wishlist it. Now that I've actually got the page up, I'm going to do a marketing push for the initial day or two and then start divvying up my time better between actually working on the game and promotional stuff. If anyone has any questions about the process of launching a Steam page, feel free to DM me or ask below and I'll see if I can answer it without breaking NDA things.
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21st July, 2020
A little while ago I decided that I'm going to be putting this game on Steam when I'm done. A couple of reasons for this:
Then there was the trailer...Oh, the trailer. This was by far the biggest pain in my arse. I haven't done any video editing really and it was quite a steep learning curve getting comfortable with how everything works. On top of that I started with an editing program that ended up being broken in a hidden way (intentionally broken by the company that owned it because a new version had been released and they clearly wanted everyone to upgrade), so about three quarters way through the project I had to restart in an entirely different program and relearn everything coming from that programs perspective. But I soldiered through and eventually came out with a little trailer. It's not perfect, but it's as close as my currently shallow skills are going to allow, so here it is:
I'm interested in some feedback on the video, is there anything egregious that I might be missing? Does it excite you? I was trying to strike the right balance between "showy" and not lying about what the product was and I think I got there in the end, but I'd be interested in hearing from both people who've played the game and people who haven't what the trailer says to them.
- I think it's a pretty neat little puzzle game and I've put a lot of work into it, especially graphically, which is a rarity for me.
- It's a good dry run for any more ambitious projects that I might want to put on Steam later on, I can learn the Steam ropes with this and hopefully earn enough to get back the Steam fee for this and get some extra to pay for the Steam fee for the next project I might want to upload there.
- The relatively small scope of this project means that I'm not investing huge chunks of time and then being desperate to recoup that in some form.
- I've never really released a commercial project before and I think it'll be an interesting experience, regardless of success or failure.
Then there was the trailer...Oh, the trailer. This was by far the biggest pain in my arse. I haven't done any video editing really and it was quite a steep learning curve getting comfortable with how everything works. On top of that I started with an editing program that ended up being broken in a hidden way (intentionally broken by the company that owned it because a new version had been released and they clearly wanted everyone to upgrade), so about three quarters way through the project I had to restart in an entirely different program and relearn everything coming from that programs perspective. But I soldiered through and eventually came out with a little trailer. It's not perfect, but it's as close as my currently shallow skills are going to allow, so here it is:
I'm interested in some feedback on the video, is there anything egregious that I might be missing? Does it excite you? I was trying to strike the right balance between "showy" and not lying about what the product was and I think I got there in the end, but I'd be interested in hearing from both people who've played the game and people who haven't what the trailer says to them.
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5th July, 2020
Not much fanfare for this update, just a million little tweaks that collectively make it more of a game than it was previously. Options menu works properly now, with the only thing that's not functional being the resolution changes. I still want to add a v-sync option, but I forgot to do it when I was making the graphics and haven't gotten around to adding it in yet. Making the nebula was both fun and frustrating. Originally, I had a single image that tiled, which you can see in the last spoiler screenshot above, but I really didn't like the obvious tiling so I always knew that I was going to redo it. Problem number 1 was making nebula images. I use Inkscape for graphics and I didn't really have a clue how to make a nice looking nebula, but after a lot of trial and error and deep diving into the internet, I came out with a relatively simple method that ended up making some really nice looking nebula. They pop a lot if they are on their own on a black background, but it was much too noisy to simply add them in, so I had to lower the opacity a lot, which removes some of the impact of them, but ends up being much better for the game overall.
Then I had to come up with a nice way of getting them to exist without tiling. I went into optimisation mode and tried a few techniques to get them filling the screen nicely without hurting performance. I eventually settled for placing them on a surface and then only drawing the part of the surface that is in view. This meant I could draw them all with a nice gpu_set_blendmode(bm_add) so that they would combine their visuals in a glowy way, rotate and scale them and not have the constant impact of batch breaks (the game barely chugs along without any nice visual flair, due to my poorly optimised physics code). And I could also save the surface to a global buffer so that when the level gets restarted due to failure, it can just read the buffer instead of recreating the whole scene (also prevents me from having to save the positions and settings for each nebula). I'm really happy with how they turned out.
Then finally, there's various tweaks to little systems throughout the game and a lot of rejiggered graphics: blackholes, whiteholes, planets, asteroids and moons all have new graphics, as well as the popups that occur upon failure or completion throughout the game. The audio options took a lot of work to function smoothly, and they still need a touch more work to get perfect, but there's always tomorrow. That's about it, it's one of those major, but somewhat minor updates.
Then I had to come up with a nice way of getting them to exist without tiling. I went into optimisation mode and tried a few techniques to get them filling the screen nicely without hurting performance. I eventually settled for placing them on a surface and then only drawing the part of the surface that is in view. This meant I could draw them all with a nice gpu_set_blendmode(bm_add) so that they would combine their visuals in a glowy way, rotate and scale them and not have the constant impact of batch breaks (the game barely chugs along without any nice visual flair, due to my poorly optimised physics code). And I could also save the surface to a global buffer so that when the level gets restarted due to failure, it can just read the buffer instead of recreating the whole scene (also prevents me from having to save the positions and settings for each nebula). I'm really happy with how they turned out.
Then finally, there's various tweaks to little systems throughout the game and a lot of rejiggered graphics: blackholes, whiteholes, planets, asteroids and moons all have new graphics, as well as the popups that occur upon failure or completion throughout the game. The audio options took a lot of work to function smoothly, and they still need a touch more work to get perfect, but there's always tomorrow. That's about it, it's one of those major, but somewhat minor updates.
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14th June, 2020
The list of stuff I did for this update
- Graphical updates to a lot of things (new ship design, title screen rejiggered, celestial objects have had some tweaks, lots of new particle effects, etc).
- The new Puzzle Editor is way better than the old one (it's been rebuilt from the ground up and has a ton of new/better features and heaps of QOL changes).
- Lots of little adjustments to things have been made (like the targeting reticle, ability to lock your engine power so you can aim consistently without changing the power, etc).
- Camera updates (though, I'm still working on some of the kinks in the camera).
- New puzzles (I've literally redone everything, so even the very basic tutorial levels are a little different).
- Sounds and music are now properly a thing.
- Plus a ton of other things I'm forgetting to mention.
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8th May, 2020
Like pretty much everyone else on the planet, I've been getting bored being stuck inside. I took a break from my other projects to create this fun little puzzle/physics game. The physics is coded from scratch, which was...interesting. It's mostly done, just polish, a few bug fixes/optimisations, some more puzzles and it'll be completed.
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