June 2025 Development Update

[p]Hi all, Tom here![/p][p]If you've been following along for a little bit you might know this is the time of year when I get to spend more time digging into game development! Last update I also mentioned what I was going to get working on in June... and I'm happy to say I've made some good progress! Let's go through it together![/p][p][/p][p]First off the glowing phosphors paper puzzle sequence is now complete enough to move on. I'm sure I'll come back to it later and tweak some things when everything is in, but its fully solvable and feels good to play.[/p][p]Also, by popular demand I've reworked how the very first puzzle in the game works as people were finding it more difficult than intended. I've done a bunch of small and subtle updates here from slightly changing the flow of how you activate the mode, to changing when certain buttons appear and are active, but perhaps the most important is the addition of a (limited) undo option, as you can see below:[/p][p][/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p][/p][p]This should give people more ability to experiment and see how the shapes interact! But I had to be careful here, because another issue I'd noticed from people playing is perfectionism – they would keep restarting if they ever messed up. But the game is about messing up and still progressing, so hopefully this will help people from getting stuck in an unintended loop. I'll keep an eye on it![/p][p]Finally, I have started work on updating a later area of the game too, adding more accessibility functionality (such as the in-built subtitles I use elsewhere) and some... mysterious buttons. Huh, I wonder what those new buttons do? The look important...[/p][p][/p][p]What's next? Well next will be finishing up the improvements to what I've started above. I need to hook up all the subtitles and make that all solvable with the new secret features. There are also more books to finish and populate the world with as we move into the next few puzzles! The aim is to get a new playable build sorted in the next few months, to test all this new stuff with a few select people... and perhaps to add in a oft-requested Quality of LIfe (QoL) feature for puzzle games like this one...[/p][p][/p][p]So I guess I better get back to it then! Chat soon yous lot![/p][p]- Amicable Animal[/p]