Tidalis Beta 1.017: Improvements To Combo Scoring At Game Over

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Original: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2011/07/tidalis-beta-1017-improvements-to-combo.html

This release fixes a single logic issue which some players had been running into thanks to the Steam Summer Camp achievement for Tidalis.  Essentially, if you won a game board with a combo, then it would not score that combo or give you achievements, because by definition it was waiting around half a second to score combos to make sure that they were really done.  That logic makes perfect sense during actual gameplay, but when a game over (victory or loss) is reached it can easily be assumed that the combo is definitely done!  So that's what the game now does.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 1.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time.  If you don't have 1.000 or later, you can download that here.

[TechSY730]

As prompted by you last blog post (http://christophermpark.blogspot.com/2012/02/thoughts-on-post-10-avww-in-wake-of.html), does this mean that Tidalis is now in, for the foreseeable future, maintenance mode? Important bug-fixes only, no new content?

Which given the relative sparsity of bug reports for Tidalis (not feature suggestions, actual bugs and oversights), with only one potential desync being anything major from what I see (as of this writing), the game seems in pretty good shape stability wise.

[x4000]

It means that, for the last year and a half, that has been the case, yes.  That was a case where we didn't particularly communicate our intents, but nobody asked or seemed to have any particular expectations.  Tidalis as a game experience is massive anyhow, for a puzzle game, and it's also something that is really rock solid on stability.  We're not really planning further patches unless something new crops up.

[TechSY730]

Just as a relatively crazy request.

Before you start on AI War as the primary focus again, any chance of getting a maintenance release on Tidalis? Like fix that last lurking desync, bring in some of the Unity "workarounds" you discovered during work on AVWW (like the keyboard "sticky keys" on minimize thing), and push out what is probably the last stable version of it so the fun stuff since 1.000 can be distributed to the masses?

A bit of a longshot, I know, but it would be a relatively nice gesture to show you still care about this game while not being too terribly expensive in terms of dev time (assuming that desync isn't very complicated to fix). This would take like what, a week to push out the new stable version on this site? (though admittedly much more work to get the distributors to push it out  )

[x4000]

Desyncs tend to be pretty time consuming to find, and I'm still at a $40,000.00 loss from having made this game in the first place.  Most people that play it seem to enjoy it as it is just fine, and there's almost nobody playing it these days.  I'm thinking this would not be the best use of resources, to be frank.

[TechSY730]

Desyncs tend to be pretty time consuming to find, and I'm still at a $40,000.00 loss from having made this game in the first place.  Most people that play it seem to enjoy it as it is just fine, and there's almost nobody playing it these days.  I'm thinking this would not be the best use of resources, to be frank.

Yea, I figured as such. Just a thought though.

As stated before, this game is in a very good state as is now. I still like to play it from time to time.

If I do manage to find something massively flawed or bugged, I'll let you know, but given that its been like two years and no massive new bugs opened (in fact, very few bugs opened at all), I doubt I will.

Thanks for your time.

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You bet!

[Castruccio]

Would you guys ever consider putting Tidalis in a Humble Bundle?  The game was critically acclaimed and is redeemable on Steam, so you'd have a strong case for inclusion.  You might be able to make some or all of your money back.

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Would you guys ever consider putting Tidalis in a Humble Bundle?  The game was critically acclaimed and is redeemable on Steam, so you'd have a strong case for inclusion.  You might be able to make some or all of your money back.

We would definitely consider something like that, and that's the sort of thing that could change everything -- Tidalis's big failing has been a failure to reach an audience, not to capture the audience it did find.  I can't really comment on things of this nature in advance, but let's just say that we do talk to a lot of various distributors and bundle folks and so on.  We'll see what happens, if anything, but we do keep our ear to the ground for that sort of thing!

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This version is now out as the default on Steam, since it's so stable, so that people don't have to update to it.  We had to convert the game from steam2 to steam3 to get that set up, but that worked out faster and cleaner than I feared it might.

While I was at it, I also fixed the volcano theme so that the lava falls on the left actually shows up correctly.

[TechSY730]

This version is now out as the default on Steam, since it's so stable, so that people don't have to update to it.  We had to convert the game from steam2 to steam3 to get that set up, but that worked out faster and cleaner than I feared it might.

While I was at it, I also fixed the volcano theme so that the lava falls on the left actually shows up correctly.

Wow, an "update"! Good to see you haven't "forgotten" about this game.

[Castruccio]

Is it bad manners to say that I think this is the second best game Arcen ever made (next to AIW)?  It's SO brilliantly done.  With the new focus on more bite-sized projects, I hope games with as much content and as many options as Tidalis has don't get overlooked. 

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Thanks for that! I'm quite proud of this one also.  This is around as bite sized as we mean, actually, by the way. This took a long time to develop because of engine work, but otherwise would have had a budget like our other upcoming games. And the scales are comparable.

[LaughingThesaurus]

This was bite-sized?
I looked at all of the content in the game and said "Gosh, it's a shame I'm actually really terrible at it, or I'd play this for ages."

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It was bite-sized in terms of how long it took us to create most parts of the content.  Not the art, or the puzzles -- those did actually take a while.  But in terms of the main form of the replayable content in particular -- all the special items and so forth -- that was all just design work and some lighter coding.  It's a lot easier for us to work with pure design issues rather than having to, say, invent a new form of lighting model that works in our specific 2D implementation, or port a game to a completely new underlying engine, or come up with an entirely new way to composite images for efficiency, or design a new GUI system from the ground up, or a new multiplayer model from the ground up... etc.

This time we have all those things already, so it's just a matter of using our existing tools and focusing on making something with a lot of depth and replayability.  The idea is deep rather than wide.  Valley 2 had 200 spells and 125+ monsters.  That took aaaaages.  The amount of art required, and the amount of coding and tuning, was enormous.  Comparatively, the 20-some blocks and 20-some game modes here seem lightweight.  It's a tremendous amount of replay value, but it's not remotely so intensive for us to create.

From a programming standpoint, the reason Tidalis was so expensive for us to make was that it was our first unity game, and that involved huge amounts of overhead and months of programming.  The actual game itself was pretty lightweight.  The art was also a pretty heavy thing in terms of time cost, but we only had one artist working on it.  Versus Exodus has currently... I think six artists working on it?  The number fluctuates.  Skyward Collapse currently has 8 IIRC.

Music is something we'll still be constrained with because we only have one composer, but he's doing different workflows now that allow him to get more done in less time.  Not like double the work, but definitely more.  There's only so much you can rush inspiration, you know?  In terms of the design aspects, we're not really doing that any faster or slower than we ever have, speaking of the new games.  The design work feedback loop is just faster since there's not such big delays based on programming it in.

Basically, Arcen has really fine-tuned the machine of creating a wide variety of types of 2D games, and so we're making use of that and also passing the savings on to players.