In this one, we added German Localization with translation help from Noah Wilson, someone I met through Discord.
This was so cool... when I released the game initially, a friend of my nephew, Supertestsubject, got in touch with me to volunteer to playtest the game.
When I started working on localization, he recommended I talk to his friend Noah who knew German.
Noah corrected all the google-translate placeholders I was using and provided full text translations for the longer text and provided updates as I added more content over time.
Both Supertestsubject and Noah are in their early teens... blows my mind.
Thank you guys so much for your help :D
We also added empty spaces to maps prior to growing them, so now the maze doesn't fill every tile from top-to-bottom, end-to-end.
This adds some obsticles for the Pigment Creatures to work around and makes mazes a little bit more organic and tricky.
In this update also, we added our first Easter Egg - Butterflies for my wife, Stella :D
Stella and I had our first date in June.
We got married one year later at Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur, CA.
We return there frequently.
It was on one of those return trips to visit a Butterfly Sanctuary when Stella suggested I quit my job to take my then-hobby of Game Development seriously.
A year later, that's what we did.
A year after that I published my first game, Prismatic Maze.
Ever year in June, Stella and I get re-married.
The second time, we invited friends and family and a friend officiated for us in a park near home.
In the next week, we're taking a trip to another park to get married by ourselves.
So, in June, the maps in Prismatic Maze will be filled with Butterflies.
May your lives be filled with as much beauty and happiness as I have had since meeting the love of my life.
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20190619
* add German localization
* add Butterfly Easter Egg, Butterfly item and split Treasure items out from Storage in Stage Select
* add random empty tiles to maps prior to growing maze
* fix bug where new maps weren't adding time items > 3
* fix bug where items were not getting removed from Player Inventory when they were added to Storage on finishing a maze
* fix bug in localization of step date in Create New Maze Menu
See blog post for more details & images: http://www.badmonkeylove.com/prismatic-maze-update-20190619
Localization Update I
Prismatic Maze is now in Bulgarian!
Hey Everybody!
In this update, we added Localization and updated some of the Item and Inventory mechanics.
For Localization, we added a localization framework and localized all the game menus into Bulgarian.
My amazing wife Stella is from Bulgaria and so her language beats out all the rest :D
Special thanks to her and her brother Hristo for the translations.
Also, in this update, we expose item counts in the Inventory menus.
Items always had counts, but those numbers weren't visible, so the counts for all the items you found in an existing games are preserved.
We also changed the drag mechanics from take-all to take-one.
Items used in new recipes do not get consumed.
We also changed how Tools Inventory works.
Previously, your Storage Inventory was split into Tools and Storage containers in the Stage Select menu automatically.
Now, those inventories are separate & you can drag Tool items from one to the other with those changes persisting.
When they are in the Tools menu they are effectively 'equipped', 'active' or 'on'.
You can now also see the Tools inventory while exploring a maze.
We've been slowly changing how the inventory and items work to make room for adding more tools.
The tools that work this way currently include the Microscope and Magnifying Glass - both of which modify what you can see while the map is being grown.
Stay tuned for more in the near future ;)
Thanks,
Chani.
Screenshots:
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20190605
* add localization framework & Bulgarian localization
* show item counts & update drag-item logic from take-all to take-one
* expose Tools Inventory as Tools menu & move items between them instead of showing filtered tools items from Storage
* drive Create New Maze Pitri-Dish visualization from Tools Inventory
* show Tools Inventory in Playing mode
See blog post for more details & images: http://www.badmonkeylove.com/prismatic-maze-update-20190605
Resolution Update
Hey Everybody!
This update redesigns how UI Menus and dialogs are positioned in the game.
It's a seemingly-small update that nontheless touches a lot of game components.
If you have been playing at 1080p, the changes you will see look like the screenshots included in this post.
If you've been playing at any other resolution... there is a decent chance that the 'before' picture looks much worse and the after picture looks pretty much the same as these.
The reason things looked different at other resolutions was because I was using pixel-specific sizes and positioning pretty much everywhere.
Unity seems to prefer pixel-specific adjustments and it does work well in some cases but when you change resolutions all the relative positions are different and things can look pretty messed up.
With this update, the UI should look pretty much the same at supported resolution.
I have been building up a list of supported resolutions, including the most commonly used desktop resolutions, some less common resolutions I've seen used, 4k just for fun and a bunch of iOS device resolutions for a future mobile release.
In addition to making everything scale better, this change cleans up a lot of these menus to have more consistent headers and text, and better button size and positioning.
Thanks,
Chani.
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20190521
* redesign UI for consistent display at all supported resolutions
* performance update for maze tile components
See blog post for more details & images:
http://www.badmonkeylove.com/blog/prismatic-maze-update-20190521
Color Cloud Update
Hey Everybody!
I'm really excited about this update.
I got to add something I'd been trying to fit in for a long time - organic color variations in the Pigment Color areas :)
Now, tiles and walls in colored pigment sections will have a mottled organic color variation instead of one consistent color scheme throughout.
Technically, this is accomplished by using a diamond-square fractal algorithm seeded with elements on the map like pigment creature locations.
The screenshots below show a side-by-side comparison of the same map before and after this change.
Screenshots:
I also redesigned how dialog menus worked - adding functionality to dismiss the menus by clicking anywhere outside of the menu and making some changes 'under the hood' related to componentization and reuse.
UI menus were some of the first Unity components I made for this game that were still pretty similar to how I wrote them initially.
I've learned a lot about how to work with these components since then and although some the menu changes in this update are not visible, they remove a lot of potential for weird interaction issues going forward.
So, you can interact with and dismiss dialog menus in a more intuitive and consistent manner now.
By far, the biggest changes in this update are mostly not visible - I dug into performance optimization seriously for the first time since initial release.
I wrote another post about it here, but the short version is now you should see a better framerate while exploring mazes and little to no stutter when moving to a new tile.
I hope you're enjoying Prismatic Maze and look forward to even more exciting changes to come.
Thanks,
Chani.
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20190510
* vary tile colors via cloud fractal
* performance redesign on tile loading, tile visibility & move validation logic
* enable dismissing dialogs by clicking outside of bounds
* enable enter/return hotkey to start maze from creating maze menu
See blog post for more details & images:
http://www.badmonkeylove.com/prismatic-maze-update-20190510
Fourth Week Update
Hey Everybody!
Today, I put out the fourth weekly update for Prismatic Maze.
This week, I focused on areas of map creation that can cause it to fail.
Map creation for mazes doesn't strictly have to be very complicated, but in this game it is quite complex due to the use of organic interactions between various components.
There is a timekeeper element that advances time in intervals. Pigments are live creatures that exist on the map at the location where their seed is placed and they listen for time updates.
Each time the clock is advanced, Pigments wake up and act - growing territory outward from their seed location to their full size based on their current age and genetic characteristics (like proliferation, aggressiveness, prosperity, fertility, etc.), spawn treasure and create interior maze walls in their territory.
At the end of the growth cycle, pigments create doors (and corridors through empty territory if necessary) to connect to adjacent territory, spawn keys outside their door, collect all items in their territory and redistribute those items within their territory.
The entire maze gets rebuilt every every cycle while taking its current state into account as it is rebuilt.
The reason it works this way is to allow each creature to interact with the world and other creatures, both directly and indirectly through the shared world state.
The interconnectedness of all things in a living, breathing game world.
The processes by which doors and corridors are created and items redistributed are the areas that I spent some time this week working on.
The corridor/door logic has been improved - some corner cases that otherwise caused failures have been mitigated & doors are now created further away from the pigment seeds with distance taking interior walls into account.
This logic still has a weakness related to circular references, though - if A opens a door to B, B will not open a door back to A but it could still open a door to C which could open a door to A.
A circle like this would cause A, B & C to be closed off from the rest of the map.
That scenario is rare, but I am working on redesigning this logic (probably using graphs) to prevent such errors.
Another area that caused some rare creation failures was in item placement.
Previously, Pigments would collect all items in their territory, adding them to those they spawned during growth cycles and distributing them to dead-ends within their territory.
If there weren't enough dead-ends to place all of their items, the process would fail out, causing the map creation to fail.
Now, the process no longer fails out and Pigments keep additional items that won't fit in their inventory.
When the player finds the Pigment's seed, a new dialog pops up with some explanation and all items in the Pigment's inventory get transferred to the player's inventory along with their seed.
The same occurs for the Black seed, which also triggers completion of the maze.
This marks the end of the first month after initial release.
I've been doing weekly updates since release and will be shifting to bi-weekly for the second month.
Thanks,
Chani.
Screenshots:
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20190425
* transfer items from pigment inventory on capturing seed/finish
* changes to logic for placing items
* changes to logic for building corridors/doors
See blog post for more details & images: http://www.badmonkeylove.com/prismatic-maze-update-20190425
Third Week Update
Hey Everybody!
Today, we sent out our third weekly update for Prismatic Maze.
We are working on a number of different improvements for scorekeeping.
In this update, we begin capturing completed mazes in game state, decorate those mazes in the load section of the Stage Select menu and expose a filter in that menu to show/hide completed maps.
This should make it easier to work with a save game that has a large number of maps and will feed into statistics and scorekeeping improvements to come.
This update also includes partial gamepad support, specifically directional movement during the maze exploration portion of the game.
For full gamepad support, we still need to rework the menus and minimap controls.
I will be working on that in the near future.
Some other changes are 'under the hood' - working towards the addition of more items, better item management, further scorekeeping improvements, as well as resilience & usability improvements.
Thanks,
Chani.
Screenshots:
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20190419
* partial gamepad support (directional control in Playing)
* capture completed maps in game info & added decoration/filter to Load Maps in Stage Select
* changed item acquisition to remove transferred items from map player inventory when completing a map
* hide items acquired on victory screen when no items are transferred
* add black seed to map player inventory on completing a map (not transferred to Stage Select)
* refactor blueprint generation to use ingredients & save list of ingredients used in blueprint
* refactor Item Description to use helper class instead of storing this data in the save game file
See blog post for more details & images: http://www.badmonkeylove.com/prismatic-maze-update-20190419
Second Week Update
Hey Everybody!
Prismatic Maze has been out for two weeks and I'm mostly been working on stability and usability updates in that time.
This week's update includes:
Stay tuned for exciting things,
Chani.
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20190412
* Add ability to continue last loaded game to Main Menu
* Auto Sort Inventory menus
* Add on-screen indicator for Save
* Randomize initial Pigment Step Direction
* Adjust some button sizes
* Adjust text padding in Creating New Maze menu
* change new blueprint logic to always add size_16 in size_8 maps
* Kick excess seeds out of recipe when reducing map size in Stage Select New Maze Recipe menu
* Add double-click activation of Load maze item in Stage Select
* fix bug in Create New Maze menu where petri-dish visualization initially showed previous map when re-launched for second time
* fix bug where new games could be created with blank name
* debug fixes for sql insert failures during creation
See blog post for more details & images: http://www.badmonkeylove.com/prismatic-maze-update-20190412
This update changes presentation of items in the Stage Select menu, splitting items you've acquired into Tools & Storage. Tools include Magnifying Glass & Microscope so far, both of which change the way you see maps being created when they're growing.. Storage includes items used as Ingredients for new maps - sizes, seeds, time, etc..
The update disables click-to-move pathfinder, which was on by default. This functionality will be unlocked by items in the near future. It was originally meant to mitigate frustration with backtracking, but I think we can make much better use of the mechanic. Having it always on makes short path traversal less enjoyable.
A few days ago, we put out some bug fixes early and included Auto-Save with those. This prevents losing progress when you close the game without saving after finishing a maze.
More to come next week :)
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20190405
* update Stage Select & Creating New Maze menus to split game inventory into Storage & Tools
* show tools on Creating New Maze menu
* show blueprint of current map on Creating New Maze menu
* disable click-to-move (will be unlocked via items in near future)
See blog post for more details & images: http://badmonkeylove.com/first-week-update
Updates & Fixes
A few players hit some issues over the launch weekend, so we jumped on those with a batch of resiliency improvements and bug fixes. Sorry for anyone who hit one of these and had a bad experience with the game because of it.
The biggest issue was a rare error in maze creation, but it was causing save games to not work correctly. This update should resolve that by detecting such issues and handling them much better. Also includes a few small changes and improvements.
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20190403b
* update map thumbnail in loading menu when exiting maze to Stage Select
* add auto-save
* bubble up errors in map creation logic, fail gracefully in creating new map dialog by switching back to Stage Select
* validate maps on loading from stage select, fail gracefully if map is invalid by annotating image & staying in Stage Select
20190402
* prevent activating item description dialog when minimap is expanded
* make collapse button on expanded minimap larger
* make esc/enter/return dismiss item description in Stage Select as it does in Playing
* reject Microphone & Magnifying Glass from recipe (they didn't do anything there)
* fix scroll speed in load game & load map menus
* fix scrollbar area in load map menu
* fix bug in creating new map menu where an invalid map (ex. previous create failed) caused new map creation to fail
