Well. April didn't go as planned.

Yeah. Unfortunately, I've been taking care of some personal matters, which still haven't been resolved. But that doesn't mean that I didn't get anything done, nor does it mean that I won't be ready to release the open alpha at the end of May. At least, I hope I'll be able to.

Code

This time around, I meant to go light on programming updates. I think that I mostly got a lot of really small tasks done since last time. Just little things here and there where there wasn't really much reason not to fix before the alpha release.

I added some effects for when the egg is clicked, whether it's an automatic click, or a player click. Just wanted to give a little more feedback for things that might happen with/without the player's input. Aesthetically, it could use a little work. But, for now, it will do for the alpha build.

I found a way to sort the upgrade buttons by price. In incremental games, that's usually the logical order for upgrades, since each one snowballs the player's progress. It kind of doesn't make as much sense to buy them out of order. While I was testing this, I also fixed a few bugs with the upgrades themselves. Until someone stumbles upon a bug, they're fully implemented.

The prices are still all nonsense though. I didn't manage to tweak them closer to their intended values yet.

I added a feature to let you ignore new morph discovery notifications with a checkbox on both the notification pop-up and the new options menu. So, that's neat. I was kind of surprised by how easy it was. Almost... suspiciously easy. But I've tested it a bunch of times and there was only one small snag that I sorted out fairly quickly.

The options window doesn't have many options to choose from (just one so far), but having it be there was kind of necessary for the morph discovery suppression feature. If people are told they can turn something off by checking a box, they assume they'll be able to turn it back on somewhere by un-checking a box. So creating an options menu became part of the bar to clear before continuing.

Not that it was difficult to do - it just took time and a little research.

Art

If you've been following me on BlueSky, then you've probably seen that I've more or less finished the sprites for 3 of the first 4 species of the game. Unfortunately, that last species isn't ready for prime time. I decided, instead of finishing those sprites and rushing it out the door, I decided to give myself another month to straighten things out a little more. Maybe, polish things up a touch here and there.

I also improved the art assets for various buttons. With the new background I added, they were in desperate need of a drop shadow or border of some kind, so they didn't blend into the background. I also made sure that I had a background sprite for all of the pop-up menus. Some of them are different sizes, and in my infinite wisdom, I didn't make them modular. So I had to make an individual sprite for each window size.

The changes are kind of easy to summarize, but it did take some work.

   

What's Next?

Obviously, first thing on the docket is anything that I didn't manage to finish in April. Those last few sprites are at the top of the priority list, of course. Since I decided the options menu was going to be mandatory, it would probably be a good idea to create an icon so that you know how to get there.

Second order of business - code changes. I still need to make sure that all calculations are in rounded amounts. I don't want to calculate cents. The class for large numbers that I'm using probably doesn't play very nice with decimals anyways. So, it's probably for the best to consistently round values to prevent floating points from showing up.

I get enough problems trying to put dollars and cents into a database with precision at work - I don't need to deal with it here.

Definitely want to get the numbers reasonably balanced before the alpha build goes live, as well. That way I can collect feedback on it and start getting ready for the final version.

Maybe if I have time, I'll add an end of demo screen, but I don't know exactly what I'd want the bar to be to unlock it. Maybe it'll come to me when I balance the numbers.

If I have time left... maybe I'll work on updating some of the buttons that are still the engine-default translucent squares.

I have some stretch goals in mind, but I'll let them be a surprise this time. It might come off as over-promising. And over-promising is usually a bad idea.