Dear players, we've just released the final game version prior to Early Access. We did some final polish and squashed several bugs found last-minute in our game. We even managed to add a new system feature that will prove useful in future updates. Take a look at the list below:
Gameplay: Added mechanism to display notifications in-game
Interface: Moved the Report Bug button from the action bar to the game menu while in-game
Bugfix: Fixed a bug that was awarding puzzle box completion point for puzzles that were already completed once
Bugfix: Fixed a bug that was allowing the player to get outside game boundaries using only the scroll wheel to move
Bugfix: Fixed a bug that was preventing puzzle container labels from being restored on game load
Bugfix: Fixed a bug that was allowing puzzle tiles to be packed on top of the puzzle box
You can find the full release notes on our website here.
We'll release the game officially later today which should make it generally available at the latest tomorrow, the 30th of May. Thank you for your continued support.
That's it for today's update. Stay tuned, keep playing, and don't forget to follow our social channels for regular news and some exclusive information about the game:
Hi everyone, we've just released a new game version focused on final polish and bug-fixes. Take a look at some of the changes:
Gameplay: Added functionality to rotate the currently inspected puzzle tile
Interface: Added player profile GUI in the Main menu that displays player info and current score
Interface: Display dynamic puzzle box rating icons based on community submitted ratings
Interface: Added missing translations for PT, ES, and DE
Bugfix: Fixed a bug that would cause an inspected puzzle tile to get stuck in the air when sent to a container with a container hotkey
Bugfix: Fixed a bug that would sometimes prevent puzzle tiles from being rotated in either direction
Bugfix: Fixed a serious bug that was causing rotated puzzle containers to disappear off the table when moved
Bugfix: Fixed a bug that could cause puzzle containers to disturb or scatter free-standing puzzle tiles in some cases
You can find the full release notes on our website here.
That's it for today's update. Stay tuned, keep playing, and don't forget to follow our social channels for regular news and some exclusive information about the game:
Dear friends, we are now entering final preparations to leave Early Access on Steam. The target date for this is 30.05.2020. All planned features have been completed and the majority of the identified issues are now fixed. We are quite satisfied with the current state of the game in terms of stability. There is one final round of polish still remaining and then we'll publish the last version in the 2019.1 release series. Of course, we will continue to support the game in the future as well as continue to add new features and more content. These are some (but not all) of the things you can expect, listed in no particular order:
Improved and recurring game events
Competitions with awards
Integration with Discord
Greater variation in puzzle tile shapes
Consumable game hints (helpers)
Easy-mode play options
Expert-mode play options
Auto-generated missions during gameplay
Double-sided puzzles
Many more free and paid puzzle boxes
With the exit from Early Access, there will be some changes to the pricing of the game and the puzzle boxes. The game will become more expensive (about two times its current price) and so will some of the puzzle boxes. If you have Masters of Puzzle on your Wishlist, now is a great time to get it at its current price. The base game comes with 15 free and very beautiful puzzle boxes that can provide literally hundreds of hours of gameplay.
For all of our Early Access players, thank you for your continued support, valuable feedback, and help in testing Masters of Puzzle. Your participation was invaluable in bringing our creation to its current state and shape. We hope you'll continue to enjoy and play our game in the future. There is nothing more satisfactory than seeing you, our fans, spend so much good time with something that we've envisioned and created. Please don't forget to rate Masters of Puzzle on Steam - it helps greatly in reaching a wider audience of players and expanding the community.
Also, visit our social channels for regular news and some exclusive information about the game:
We release another small update with some final content updates and overall polish in various areas. Take a look at what's new:
Gameplay: Freestanding puzzle tiles can now be thrown into a container using the corresponding shortcut keys (F2 to F7) without the need to pick them up first – simply point the mouse cursor on a puzzle tile you want to send to a container and hit the corresponding key
Gameplay: Extended the game Tutorial with additional steps to cover most of the advanced game features
Gameplay: Changed container empty function to use LMB for Confirm action and RMB for Cancel action
Gameplay: ESC key now opens/closes the in-game menu (this is in addition to the F10 key doing the same)
Interface: Improved the in-game GUI for puzzle tile containers. Open/close of a container widget now happens with a mouse click rather than a hoover. The visible section shows only tile information, shortcut key, and the custom label. The stash and empty buttons are now hidden
Content: Enabled 2500, 3000, and 4000 tilesets for puzzle boxes “Steampunk Hearse”, “The Goblin Watermill”, “Clockwork Factory”, and “The Being”
Content: Added more than 60 new achievements
Framework: Added gameplay statistics data collection (used for analytics purposes only)
You can find the full release notes on our website here.
That's it for today's update. Stay tuned, keep playing, and don't forget to follow our social channels for regular news and some exclusive information about the game:
New Puzzle Collection - Terran Utopia by Christian Hecker
With great pleasure, we want to present a brand new collection for Masters of Puzzle that will be released alongside our exit of Early Access later this month. It contains 5 amazing illustrations by the german artist Christian Hecker. We contacted Chris last month because we liked very much his art and the fact it's so suited for creating puzzles. He was happy to start a collaboration with us and see his art in our game. Here is a short introduction by Chris himself:
Hi, my name is Christian and I’m from Nuremberg, Germany. In the ever-growing world of Digital Art (Artstation, Deviantart, etc.) you can also find me under the name ‘Tigaer’. I’m currently freelancing and open for commissions in the fields of Illustration for all kinds of covers as well as concept art for whatever is requested and fits my style. I started my professional journey around 2008 and learned a lot of different techniques since then. For my work, it seems like I settled with a mix of 3d and 2d that is combined and refined with Photoshop.
Website: https://www.tigaer-design.com
Art Communities: https://www.deviantart.com/tigaer https://tigaer.cgsociety.org/ https://www.artstation.com/tigaer
Social Media: https://www.facebook.com/christian.hecker.3139 https://www.instagram.com/tigaerdesign/ https://twitter.com/tigaer
This new puzzle collection is named Terran Utopia and features wonderful renderings of the humanity future as imagined by Christian. We are amazed by the amount of detail in the illustrations as well as the stunning imagination of the author. The puzzle boxes are still locked, but until then here is a sneak peek of the entire collection:
Escape
Skyhigh
In Serenity
Trip
Worlds We Know
We hope you like the art and will have a great time with the puzzles created with it. Make sure to share your thoughts and comments below so we know whether we bring you illustrations you love and enjoy.
Don't forget to follow our social channels for regular news and some exclusive information about the game:
Hi everyone, this is a small update mostly related to the new puzzle collection we plan to release with our exit from early access (check out our other post about the collection itself). We also finished the in-game part of our new puzzle rating system:
Interface: Added functionality to submit player ratings for completed puzzle boxes both from within the collections menu and upon game completion
Interface: Restricted puzzle ratings to be accessible only to authenticated and registered players
Content: Added new puzzle collection in Traditional art with 5 new puzzle boxes in it. These are currently still locked
Bugfix: Fixed a bug that caused too many puzzle tiles to be generated for boxes above 2000 puzzle tiles
Bugfix: Fixed a bug that was sometimes causing puzzle tiles to not be generated at all due to false collision detections
You can find the full release notes on our website here.
Puzzle Box Difficulty Rating System - Continued
As a reminder, the game uses a rating system with 9 levels of difficulty each with a key letter that links them to our Achievements system. The ratings are also color-coded for easy identification going in a gradient from soft blue (N) to soft red (R). You can now submit a rating for each puzzle box completed with a certain tileset configuration. You can do that from within the game either upon the puzzle completion or at any time from the collections GUI in the Main Menu.
That's it for today's update. Stay tuned, keep playing, and don't forget to follow our social channels for regular news and some exclusive information about the game:
This is a small patch containing the following fixes and improvements:
Interface: Added new start game option to use dark or light texture on the playing surface
Interface: Added new puzzle box "Escape" and its new collection "Terran Utopia"
Interface: Changed the collection preview GUI item to dynamically display images of the puzzles inside
Gameplay: Disabled puzzle tile inspection action when the player is too low above the surface
Bugfix: Fixed a bug that could allow puzzle tiles to slip under the playing surface when the player drops them just above the mat underlay edge
Thank you for your support and keep having fun!
Release Version 2019.1.7420
Today we are releasing another important release version. While it again contains polish and fixes, the major purpose of it is to link you, our players, with our new cloud server. We'll talk about this in more depth below, but for now, let's check what else is new:
Framework: Implemented full integration with Belleal Games cloud server. This includes authentication, registration, storing of player statistics, and more
Gameplay: Added in-game option to switch between light (marble) and dark (velcro) play surface. This is preserved between saves as well
Interface: Added functionality to display game hints in the main menu (was only possible to do so in-game)
Interface: Added optional email field to bug reporting GUI in case player wants to be contacted for the issue reported
Bugfix: Fixed a bug that was causing some puzzle tile links not to be counted in the stats. Keep in mind that links are counted only for free-standing tiles and not for tiles placed on the mat
Bugfix: Fixed issues with the inspection lens glass shader which was making the magnified image look clouded and lighter
Bugfix: Fixed a bug that caused face down puzzle tiles that were found outside the game board to be returned under the table. This was essentially making these tiles disappear from the game board
Bugfix: Fixed a bug with the puzzle tile containers that prevented them from boing spawned on the game board
As always, you can find the full release notes on our website here.
New Belleal Games Server
When we started 3 years ago on this journey, we've found a good cloud service that provided a server backend for games of all sorts. They offered a free tier service that was ideal for indie studios like ours since we could not afford to invest in infrastructure and custom servers. That service was PlayFab.
While PlayFab is still there and pretty much intact, they were purchased by Microsoft, and recently they decided to change their pricing policy. Right now the free tier is still available, but it's no longer useful for anything besides development and planning purposes. The lowest-paid tier offered is by far insufficient for our goals with Masters of Puzzle, so we've decided to move from PlayFab to our own cloud server located in Google Cloud. This will allow us to control our costs and develop server-dependent features that would otherwise be impossible.
We are happy to announce that we've been successful and our new game server is now up and running. In fact, this release version is fully integrated with it and you are now able to create player profiles in our system.
Player Profiles
We've planned a lot of new and exciting features for Masters of Puzzle. Some of these features require server-side logic and a database to be made a reality. Luckily with our new game server, this is now possible. All such features will require the player to create a simple profile in our system, which we'll use to personalize their experience with our game. You don't need to go outside the game to do that. For your convenience, once you use the authentication for the first time, you will be asked to enter and submit a display name and email (optional). Upon success, your profile will be created and you can authenticate automatically in the future if you so wish.
Of course, you are not required to create a player profile, but without one all server-based features of the game will be unavailable to you. Since the profile does not ask you for or will ever contain any personal information, it is highly recommended to create one and enjoy the full game experience.
Alright, that's it for today. Thank you so much for being our fans and playing our game! We'll see you soon in our next update. Stay safe and stay home!
Don't forget to follow our social channels for regular news and some exclusive information about the game:
