I'm happy to report that the alpha is launched for anyone to try! Given that I was still busy at the beginning of the month, I'm surprised at how much I finished before the deadline. Not only was I on-target, but I even did some things that I was planning to defer for later. So, let's just get into it.

That is, after I share the link to the alpha:

https://rustyknightgames.itch.io/idle-exotics-alpha

Code

For starters, rounding the dollar amounts on everything wasn't so bad. The "big number" library I was using doesn't have a ceiling function, so I had to make my own. But, that didn't take long, and I had rounded all of the amounts fairly easily. The formatting wasn't bad either, but I might see if I can reduce some of the place values, especially for the numbers in the thousands. 1.345 K takes up about as much space as 1,345. Or maybe I just won't abbreviate until we reach the millions? I'm sure I'll have it figured out by the time the game is finished.

The main take away is that there will be no cents showing in this game, and abbreviations are working.

Something I added to the docket was a change I made to all the pop-up menus that allows you to close them while clicking outside of their boundaries. This was causing issues where clicking objects outside of the pop-up was causing them to active despite the window being open. And, generally, that's not a good idea. So fixing that problem made its way into the build as well.

I also added an opening screen and an "end of demo" screen. It was surprisingly easy to get it all tied together and going from opening to the main gameplay loop to the end screen.

Speaking of the end screen, I re-balanced all the numbers, so hopefully now players will actually have a meaningful path to the end of the demo. I suspect the player's income is still increasing at too low of a rate for the final product, but I think this is a good starting point. It's going to get more complicated later when the prestige system is finished, because that will add additional growth rates to the player's income. So, I'll just have to play it by ear from here on out.

Of course, long-term testing for launch revealed various bugs. I'm sure that I'm forgetting a few, but here are some of the more noteworthy ones that I straightened out.

There was a bug in the function that takes 2 parent Morphs and makes an offspring Morph, where it was nearly-impossible to get the color blue. There are some situations that should make it a very high chance, but when blue was supposed to be given as the result, it would just assign the wrong color. Another bug in the same script was making an entire pattern impossible to discover via breeding. Neither of which is what you want in a game where players are intended to try to collect all the different possible combinations.

There was a bug where occasionally, adding to the player's total cash would also multiply their total by 10 after the addition. While I'm sure players might appreciate that, I did want it sorted out before the first release. I found out from a comment on the GitHub page for the library that I was using to handle big numbers, that this was a common issue. Thankfully, the thread contained a fix, which I used to update the library, and this one didn't end up being my fault.

One thing that was my fault was that my implementation of the "click outside of a pop-up to close it" feature was a bit haphazard. It caused a strange species re-assignment bug, which I sorted out fairly quickly. Basically, if you opened the species selector via the breeding menu, closed the selector without picking a species, and then opened the menu via the "now hatching" button, it would change the species in the breeding menu that originally opened the pop-up. This is not great, because that also clears any morphs you've selected in the menu if you pick something other than what's already selected, which causes the progress bar to lose all progress. So, getting that fixed was a big deal.

Art

This time around I finished up the last bit of art I needed - I finished that last species for the original 4, which was kind of a big ask. I kind of didn't know exactly where I wanted to go with it at the beginning of the month. The design came together in the end though, and I think I did a decent job, even if most of the sprites in the alpha might need a little touch-up here and there as I keep working.

I finished getting most of the buttons ready. There are still a few "default buttons" like in the pop-up windows that still have an "x" in the corner. But those I left the way they were on purpose. I'm playing around with the idea of making my own font, and I'd want to use said font for things like that. So, that's why I decided to leave it alone. I added a custom checkbox into the mix - that's pretty neat.

I also finished the gear icon for the options menu. It was deceptively difficult. You'd think that something so regular in shape would be easy in a medium where you can copy+paste and mirror your work to make it perfectly symmetrical, but no. The gear icon spares no artist. Getting the sides of the diagonal teeth to look like they were coming out at the same angle as the vertical and horizontal teeth was the main pain point, but I managed to do it well enough.

Finally, I selected color loadouts for each species. Like everything, I'm sure those aren't the final color selections, but it'll do for now.

What's Next?

Well, just because the alpha is out, that doesn't mean that we're done here. I think for June, it's going to be mostly art tasks. I have 1 design for the next tier about... 75% done. But, that leaves 3 others that need to be started from the concept up. So, getting those sketched and getting sprites started is going to be priority one, barring any major issues discovered by people playing the demo. If I need to hot-fix something, that will take priority. But, until something game-breaking happens, art is at the top of the list.

I have a development roadmap, which does include new features. But, I'm going to keep new features to a minimum for a little while. If I finish with the art assets early, then I might dip into some of the new features I want to implement. For example, I noticed during extended play testing sessions that a "Pause" button on the breeding interface is going to be needed, and it's a pretty small ask. It doesn't shatter the player experience, but it is a quality of life change that I want to be there soon. Stuff like that, which can just be added to the most recent version of the game, are probably going to be the main code changes. After we have the new species done, that's when I start targeting some of the big features that won't show up until the Beta version.

Down the line, when I'm feeling like it's time to update to the Beta version, that's when I'll start working on the bigger features.

Anyways,  I hope you guys give the alpha a try and share your feedback! I will be putting out rolling updates, which can contain additional number re-balances and additional small features. So, keep an eye out for future updates!