High score pages are back
Now you can again see the online high scores for my games here on the website:
Polychoron global top 100 high scores.
Hyper Ultra Astronautics survival co-op mode top 10 high scores.
This isn't really a new feature. The original high score pages broke long time ago and I had to remove them. Now I finally rolled up my sleeves and created new functioning pages.
Posted on 2022-04-08
Polychoron 1.0.1 released
This is a minor maintenance update. It has been nearly three months since Polychoron release and I have received very few bug reports. I take this as a good sign.
There are some crashes reported on Google Play. Most of them seem to be related bad GLES3 support on old Android versions and luckily they seem to be affecting only a small number of players. I would like to fix these too but they are very hard to resolve unless workarounds are implemented in Godot Engine itself. I did upgrade the engine to latest stable version (3.4) which should at least improve input responsiveness on lower end devices.
Vast majority of the players have been playing the mobile version, which feels kind of weird as I have always viewed Polychoron as primarily a desktop game, best played with mouse and keyboard. I thought playing a 6DoF game on touch screen would be impossible but I'm glad to be wrong. Ratings and reviews have been mostly positive.
Here are the changes since version 1.0.0:
- Changed menu background color to lighter blue.
- Switched to use "weak" vibration motor in gamepads for better compatibility.
- Added an option to disable vibration effects in settings.
- Improved input responsiveness on low-end Android devices.
See Polychoron game page for more information. Direct downloads have been updated on Itch.io. Android version update has been uploaded on Google Play and will be available shortly. Web version has been updated on GotM.io.
Posted on 2021-12-15
Polychoron 1.0.0 released
It's done! After two years since the initial game jam game, Polychoron is finally ready.
There are very few changes since the last beta version:
- Only show high scores from version 1.0.0 and later.
- Fixed maze wireframe sometimes appearing on top of HUD texts.
- Include game version information in the log file.
- Adjusted menu info text positions on mobile to avoid rounded corners.
I also upgraded Godot engine to version 3.3.3 which brings a couple of relevant bug fixes:
- Resolve issue where the Godot app remains stuck when resuming #51584.
- Fix game controllers ignoring the last listed button #48934
- Fix IP address resolution incorrectly locking the main thread #51212
If you're wondering where all your precious high scores went, they are still there but only visible in previous alpha/beta versions. Due to so many changes affecting game's difficulty during development, I decided to "reset" the high scores on this release to allow fair competition from here on.
Polychoron is now available as pay-what-you-want title on Itch.io (no minimum payment).
See Polychoron game page for more information. Direct downloads have been updated on Itch.io. Android version update has been uploaded on Google Play and will be available shortly. Web version has been updated on GotM.io.
Posted on 2021-09-22
Polychoron 0.1.1 beta released
This update to Polychoron brings minor improvements, bug fixes and adjustments to the difficulty curve.
The most important change is the improved line of sight testing. Previously, a patient player could easily lurk behind corners and find shooting positions where the enemy does not see the player. It's still possible but a lot harder. The enemy now shoots at the player even if it only sees a part of the ship. This also fixes the cases where an enemy drone is already partially visible from player's starting position.
There is now an option to draw a white wireframe overlay on top of the maze geometry. This was primarily intended for the mobile version to improve visibility when playing in brightly lit environment but I decided to include it in all versions.
The game's difficulty curve has changed slightly. As the line of sight changes make the game a little harder, the enemy weapon damage and projectile speed now increases a bit slower. Their delay from target detection to shooting decreases faster now but starts higher. Please let me know how these changes feel.
Here's the full change log since beta version 0.1.0:
- Added a tip about double-tap-and-shoot gesture for shooting in the mobile version.
- Increased ambient light and ship spotlight brightness slightly.
- Fixed wrong titles in video and audio settings menus.
- Added an optional visible maze wireframe.
- Removed broken debanding setting in the mobile version.
- Properly adjust GLES2 renderer lighting for the camera outside level too.
- Moved virtual shoot button slightly closer to screen center in the mobile version.
- Added a setting for hiding touch screen control overlays.
- Use all available screen space for roll control on top left part of the touch screen.
- Removed confusing red crosses left in place of destroyed drones.
- Fixed weird colored flashes at level start when global illumination is enabled.
- Lowered the frequency of emergency repair power-ups on higher levels.
- Fixed enemies spawning in positions where they are visible from player start point.
- Made enemies see the player when any part of the ship is visible.
- Adjusted enemy shoot delays for slightly easier start but faster decrease on higher levels.
See Polychoron game page for more information. Direct downloads have been updated on Itch.io. Android version update has been uploaded on Google Play and will be available shortly. Web version has been updated on GotM.io.
Posted on 2021-08-13
Worm Race from 1994
I have probably mentioned a worm racing game I that remember making a long time ago but so far I had no evidence that it even existed. I had already began to question my memory when I recently found a pile of 3.5" floppy disks from my parents' house. One disk in particular caught my attention:
Of course I didn't have any PC with floppy disk drive at hand as I'm not too keen on hoarding obsolete hardware. Luckily there was one external USB floppy drive at a local public library that I could use. I went through the pile of disks: A few of them were completely gone and many required multiple attempts to read them without errors. The mystery disk with marking "WR" initially seemed damaged beyond repair but I eventually managed to create an image of the disk and got access to its contents. And there it was, the long lost game called Worm Race with its QuickBasic source code! There is even documentation on how to make tracks for it (in Finnish).
Worm Race is very likely my first finished proper game project. The player controls a worm and the objective is to finish a set number of laps around the track while collecting colored boxes appearing around the track. There is a high score table for the fastest players.
The source files are dated in 1994 and 1995. The game is written entirely in QuickBasic. Soon after finishing this I switched to C language because even this simple game was already hitting the performance limitations of interpreted Basic language on a 1994 low-end PC.
A bit surprisingly, I was able to run it in DosBox without any issues. Here's the original version 1.1 in case someone wants to give it a go.
It's nice to know that this game really existed.
Posted on 2021-08-04