Woops, it seems that I haven't been posting any news here at all. I'll try to correct that from now on. I've been working a ton on Blooprent. My goal is to get it finished as soon as possible, definitely before summer ends.
The first step I took towards improving Blooprent was to separate the code that draws everything on screen from the code that calculates all the game logic. More improvements can be made in this area in the future for optimization, but the changes I've made are critical to making the game more enjoyable. In order to complete a level in Blooprent, you must press 'Play' (or 'Finalize' in future versions) when you want to test your result. It was time consuming to wait for the dots to get to the goal, but now that the draw code is disconnected, I made it go into a new super speed mode that calculates more often than it draws. This allows you to get your results back much quicker.
Then I started making graphical changes. In the past, it wasn't immediately obvious which blocks were placed by the player and which blocks the level started out with. This problem has been resolved.
As you can see, the player-created blocks have a low fidelity look to them with a grid pattern.
The end of the level screen for Blooprent always bothered me. It was trying to get too much information across, and never felt like it was rewarding you. Now the end of the level screen has four stages to it. The first stage shows your time, and the time required for gold, silver, and bronze stars. Appropriate sound effects are played for each part of the event, applause will play if you did well and a sad trombone will play otherwise.
The second and third stage are much like the first, they display the players entity usage and efficiency. The fourth 'stage' displays their all time achievement for the level.
The main menu has been completely redone in the new style seen above. This made the task select portion look out of place, and so that has been redone as well. I am now working my way into redoing the in-game GUI and the user-created portion.
More news coming soon, news about all my games and projects can be found on my website:
You can get the game by donating any amount of money, or grab a free copy from my forums.
