The 100-Player Twitch Chat Party Pack News

Hey there!

I have to run and watch more Great British Bake Off Christmas Edition, so there are small updates for today. But I think they'll make things better for you and your streamers.

List of changes in version 0.49:

• Minesweeper Extreme: 100 won't let viewers run off the map by typing a letter without a number ("!A" or "!C" instead of "!A5" or "!C4"). No escaping is allowed.
  
• Minesweeper Extreme: 100 now forces viewers to type an exclamation point when entering a command. so "!A5" or "!C4" instead of "A5" or "C4". It was leading to too many accidental movements. This has made Captain Goose unhappy, but I'll correct that soon.
  
• More language translation work for the main menu through joining the lobby. Still more work to do!
  

As always, I love to get feedback. Let me know how I can make the game better for your stream and I'll do my best.

That's all for now and I hope you enjoy the latest update!

-Jaime

Hey there!

More changes are happening and I'm excited to share the progress I've made with you!

With all the players coming in from outside the US, I have started prioritizing translations for French, Korean, and Spanish. Only the beginning connection process is fully translated, and the game now asks you for your language and remembers this for the next time you log in.

Also, for Minesweeper Extreme: 100, I added a website with the full rules and animated gifs, so that people can figure things out faster. It's located here: https://www.boardgamefightclub.com/minesweeper-extreme-100-rules/ These rules will be posted by the BoardGameFightClub bot when you open the game.

I was also able to track down a miserable bug that was messing with the Twitch chat connection. It's not 100% solved, but the Twitch connection is way more likely to succeed now. Turns out when you click a button in GameMaker Studio, it keeps clicking it rapidly until the button dies, so my code was opening like 5 connections to Twitch at the same time which causes chaos. That's all better and I still have one last thing to track down before it's solved for good (hopefully).

Latest changes in version 0.48:

1. Added language options and translations for the connection process
   
2. Language settings are remembered
   
3. A new webpage for rules has been added
   
4. Twitch connection is more likely to not fail
   
5. Code cleanup
   

As always, I love to get feedback, and let me know how I can make the game better for your stream.

That's all for now and I hope you enjoy the latest update!

All the best!
-Jaime

Hey there!

Two changes have been made to address 2 big problems that have bothered me (and others!) for the longest time. Here are the problems and solutions.

1. Since the beginning, the game would walk you through the entire connection process which took forever. Now, it will remember your screenname, and you'll still have to do a quick 2-factor authentication to connect, but it no longer takes 60 seconds to start playing every single time. Eventually, I'll be able to simply auto-reconnect you!
   
2. The game is designed for 1080p, and as people have been getting bigger monitors, and wider monitors, the game looks like a horrible mess, if it even functions at all. There was a big streamer playing on a 4K monitor, and it, uhhh.... didn't work. Now, a 4K screen will scale properly, and any other size will be a little ugly, but it will be functional at least. I'll make more progress on this as I have time.
   

The next items on my list are better instructions (I really like the way Kukoro Stream Games does it), and a complete update to Happy Tanksgiving to make it more like Robo Rally.

Latest changes in version 0.47:

1. 4K monitors are now properly supported.
   
2. Other types of monitors are now functional, if a little ugly.
   
3. If you are a returning player, you don't have to go through the entire reconnection process, just a small part of it.
   
4. Minor cleanup to Minesweeper Extreme: 100
   
5. Code cleanup
   

As always, I love to get feedback, and let me know how I can make the game better for your stream.

That's all for now and I hope you enjoy the latest update!

All the best!
-Jaime

Hello!

It may not look like much, but todays update seriously improves Minesweeper Extreme: 100, and it's been something on my mind for a long time.

The problem:

It takes forever to get things done as a viewer in Minesweeper Extreme: 100. You know it, I know it, the American people know it, Bob Dole knows it. Typing "up" "left" "down" "dig" "up" one at a time, over and over again, is great if you like a slow, surgical precision game. But this is minesweeper where bombs are going off and people are dying. We have no time for that.

The solution:

Battleship-style controls, where you type in a single letter-number combination on the grid, and your character just goes there and starts digging, not only makes the game far easier to get into and play, but it also goes waaaay faster. You no longer have to type 12 commands to cover the length of the map. Now you can pick the space you want to dig at, and it just works. I'm sad it took me 2 years to get here.

Anyways, here are the small list of changes in version 0.45:

• Minesweeper Extreme: 100 now lets viewers control their character with Battleship-style commands
  
• Behind-the-scenes work being done to deal with language support and twitch connection at the beginning
  

Let me know if you've got any feedback or features you'd like to see, and until next time, I wish you all the best!

-Jaime

Another day, another update.

Had some time today, and started work on implementing some Vlambeer-style gamefeel to Happy Tanksgiving. It already feels better. Nothing too fancy, but supertank bullets are faster and bigger, and don't always go exactly straight. I've also started to add some 8-bit sound effects to the game to try and capture the arcade feel, but they are not audible yet.

Here is the small list of changes in version 0.45:

• Updated the supertank art to not look as cartoony.
  
• Changed the supertank bullets to be bigger and faster, and they veer slightly off-center.
  
• When the map starts to cave in, it now looks like the map is suspended in the air, instead of like a bunch of individual holes. This has bothered me for so long and it looks way better now!
  

Let me know if you've got any feedback or features you'd like to see, and until next time, I wish you all the best!

-Jaime