Hi, everyone! Welcome to the first developer's diary on our journey of another year of this endless game.
This week, we celebrated the game's 19th birthday with a surprise update to the very first version of the game or "the first world." I know some people still play that version even after 19 years. And I never forgot how everything starts.
That version lives on as a mod of our current game. To make it more accessible, we can now access it from the game's title screen.
But, from a story point of view, it's still better to find the hidden cyber cafe and launch that version from there. The story of all three worlds of our "Stone Age" are connected by a story both inside and outside the game.
Next is something from the second world. That world still has a pile of treasury code there not yet ported to our current third world. Here comes the sliding puzzle game.
Do you remember there is a time Steam is full of such simple puzzle games with beautiful girl images? I will give you this for free as it's part of our legacy. I didn't make a sliding puzzle just to show some nice images. Instead, when I first developed this feature back in the second world, I was studying AI to automatically solve such puzzles. Thus, the old AI is here as well. You can ask your teammates to solve this puzzle for you. They will use a search tree algorithm to solve it. As it's another mini-game, some exp rewards and GPA coins are to be expected. Moreover, in addition to unlocking all possible images to play by progressing the stories, you can use your own images, and make your own sliding puzzles. Maybe, you will never need another sliding puzzle game on Steam anymore.
The sliding puzzle also serves a storytelling purpose. Many of its default images come with a background story of the game. Once you solve it, you can get more information about this supernatural world.
It's the start of a new era. Thus, Captain Nameless got his long overdue 3D model upgrade.
About three years ago, his model was made with Fuse. A nice software to quickly make 3D game characters. Unfortunately, Adobe acquired and abandoned it. Now, with some more advanced character-creating software, I am able to give him a new model. Now you know why he previously didn't face the camera during all those cutscenes and photos. Time to allow him to join your relationships.
What more about this week?
The stories inside the Black Pyramid come to a conclusion with two different endings. Combined with your previous choices, you can get a lot of different outcomes. In this journey in Egypt, you find many different characters to join you on your quest. Yet, they all have their own desires and goals. You cannot make everyone happy. But will you stay true to your previous promises, will you be loyal to your allies? Or, will you change your mind at the last minute after knowing more about the consequences? We all make hard decisions in our life. No matter what choices you make. Maybe at some point in our life, we all have something we regret. Yet it's our past that defines who we are. What matters more is how we keep going forward.
That's for this week.
One more thing, R.I.P. to Coco Lee, the singer of "Mulan." Another star went dark during this game's long history of updates. The game outlived too many good people along the way. Each time, it brings sorrow.
Today's changelog:
############Content################
[Sliding Puzzle]A character who solves puzzles now gains a small amount of EXP.
[Loot]Added an item drop list for Templar Knights.
[Loot]Added an item drop list for Meketaten.
[Lost in the Sand]If you finished the Black Pyramid part of the story with the "Capture" ending, a certain character will then haunt the Otherworldly Desert of Trapped and attack you on sight. She becomes much more reckless than she was in the Black Pyramid.
############System#################
[Mod]Allow mods to run a piece of code right after the game is initialized. (However, it's possible this piece of code may be called multiple times. Please make sure you set up flags if you only want to run it once.)
[Mod]Mods can now register an icon on the title screen and launch it from there directly.
[Mod]"Back to the Stone Age" can now start right on the title screen.
Latest news from Ukraine:
https://controlc.com/f37c6bd1
