Progress Report

Sorry (once again) for the delay - believe me, it's frustrating me as much as anyone. But I thought you'd appreciate it more if, instead of teasing you with another empty progress report, I waited until I was ready to give you an actual release before I posted again.

Yes, that's right, I have a release ready. I'm not sure I'm 100% satisfied with the Labyrinth stage, but seeing as I've worked on it for about a month, and every other stage closer to just a week, I'm tired of tweaking it and rethinking it. So I'm leaving it up to you, the testers, to let me know what you think of it. Frankly, I'm concerned that the one tester I've had feedback from on this stage is skewing my perception, since she's apparently the sort of person who can sit for 35 minutes straight wandering down aimless passages trying to solve a maze, without thinking anything of it. :p

So, please, let me know what you think of the maze, as well as the rest of the game. I'd love to hear your reaction to the secret, alternate ending if and when you manage to unlock it, as well. I had a lot of fun putting it together, and am very excited to show it off.

I'm putting the release on a separate page this time, so I can make it a sort of "official" release page, now that the game is going into "beta" phase (I guess). Alterations may still be made in the future, depending on the feedback I get, but this is where I close the main development stage and say that, barring bugs and the occasional conceptual exception (and my testers will be crucial for that), the game is pretty much finished, and I'm done working on it - at least in a regular, daily capacity.

Get the download here!

Progress Report

I have to apologize. I really wanted to get the next release out before this weekend (I'm going away, and won't be able to work on the game for several days), but it's just not going to happen. So you'll have to be a little bit more patient. Everything is pretty much finished (although I still need to go through the game and make sure everything works and there are no last minute tweaks), except the Labyrinth stage which I am still working on.

I swear, this stage is turning out to be the bane of this project. It's not to a point where I just want to give up yet - I think there is potential here for a really great stage. But there are just so many options, and wrapping my head around these mazes (to a sufficient degree of mastery as to predict how the player will experience them), while also trying to design unique challenges to disorient the player and ramp up the difficulty of solving the maze, while introducing a certain level of randomness...it boggles the mind. And every time I think I've got a good maze design to work on, I have to spend several hours building it in the map editor - so far only to ultimately decide that it's not good enough. :-\

(maze analysis)

It's pretty frustrating. But I'm still plugging away at it. Give me another week, and I'll see what I can come up with.