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:

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.

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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:

I also upgraded Godot engine to version 3.3.3 which brings a couple of relevant bug fixes:

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.

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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:

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.

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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.

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Posted on 2021-08-04

Polychoron 0.1.0 beta released

Polychoron has gone beta! As expected, this first beta update does not bring any major changes, just some visual improvements and minor bug fixes.

Here's the change log since last alpha version 0.0.10:

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.

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Posted on 2021-07-02

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