HUGE anniversary update! Beta release!

This update is so major, that I feel the need to upgrade my game to beta release status. With this update, the last of the core concepts that I have are set up. However, this is not the end! Everything can still be expanded. There is room for growth. There is even room for change. However, before I get into all of that, I have a special announcement to make!

Happy birthday Coding Cards!!!

One year ago on this day, on May 20th, 2024,  I opened Unity with a rough outline of an idea in my mind, struggled to think for a moment, and decided to "temporarily" name my project Coding Cards. One year later, I still have yet to think of a better name, so it's looking like that one's sticking. It's been a long journey to get here. Development has not been smooth. There's been a few times where I found that I hadn't opened the project for a month. But, here I am, and here my game is, looking better than ever! So, with that out of the way, let's get into what makes this update so super huge! Happy birthday Coding Cards! It's been a wild journey so far!

ALSO! There are some breaking changes this update. I speak about them at the bottom, so please at the very least scroll all the way down and give the section a glance. It's short. 

The new stuff

Improved map 

Obstacles

I'm pretty sure I've spoken about obstacles here before. They've been set up in the code for a long time, but since the board generation was completely random, I couldn't turn them on. The possibility of an impossible map being generated stopped me. Well, that's fixed now!

• Obstacles now exist
• There are two types of obstacles: walls and pits
• Both block movement (both player and enemy), but pits do not block player bullets
• All types of AOE attacks (both player and enemy) ignore all obstacles. (this is due to how they're programmed. I'll probably change this in the future)

Traps

Along with obstacles, there are now also traps that spawn on the map! The term 'trap' is a bit of a misnomer because they are not all negative. There are currently four types of traps:

• Floor spike
• Wall spear
• Colour shifter
• Free shield

They each have their own activation trigger(s), and I can make new and different triggers in a (probably overcomplicated) system that I made, so I'm pretty happy with them. 

To go over them briefly though, floor spike will attack the cell that it's on, wall spear will attack two cells in a line (and doesn't need to be next to/on a wall), colour shift will change the colour of the tile that it's on, and free shield will give the player a free shield. 

They all look visually different and, like everything else, they have tooltips as well. 

Classes!

This is one I'm pretty excited to share. It's been an idea in the back of my mind for a very long time now, so I'm glad I finally got around to it! Classes bring forth something that, to me, the game desperately needed: run variance. There are currently four different classes. Each of them play slightly differently due to the unique set of commands (the lines of code that go on cards) that they have access to. They're generally split into two types: combat type and movement type. The Fighter and Ranger are the combat types whereas the Mover is a movement type. The Standard class is more well-rounded. To give you a sneak peak of what they each do, here's a little breakdown:

• Standard - basically what the game was before
• Fighter - has melee attacks, as well as two different weapons
• Mover - can move in diagonals and can push enemies around
• Ranger - has a powerful arsenal of ranged attacks, including bombs and homing bullets

They all play quite differently, so I hope they're well received!

Killing all enemies = level win

The introduction of classes forced me to finally implement something that should have been done months ago - you can now beat a level by killing all the enemies! That's right, there's a second win condition! 

To balance this, along with the new classes, I did some money changes:

• As before, you get money for killing enemies. The amount has been increased slightly. 
• Executing a script now costs 1 money. (This is also to encourage using loops and not relying on the cards that you always draw). If you have no money, you can still execute a script. You cannot have negative money.
• Collecting a key gives some money
• Getting to the gate quickly also gives money (15 - 1 for every time you hit the execute script button)

Money is still only used in the card editor (and execute button). I plan on making it used elsewhere, but I'm not fully certain yet.

Other minor stuff and bugfixes

• There is now a popup for when an infinite while loop is detected and skipped
• Variables of cards can now be cycled in both direction - left click to go forward, right click to go backwards
• The player now starts with a shield (regardless of class) to prevent spawn kills
• Some modifier names have been changed to be more thematic - 'permadraw' is now 'cached', 'exhaust' is now 'singleton'
• Some sprites for the floor tiles were made (made by Toby1364)
• I changed the background color
• The execute, reset, discard, etc buttons were condensed a bit
• Some card printer dropdowns now have tooltips (specifically the bombs that the Ranger class has access to)

Bug fixes

(if this list seems small, I don't keep track of all the bugs that I fix, and some of the bugs I have noted down in my personal dev log are bug that never got released, so I don't share them. There were a lot of internal bugs/growing pains for across everything during this past month. Me saying something like "fixed AOE targeting to remove duplicate entries to prevent duplicate dictionary key entries" doesn't mean much now, does it?)

• The tooltip now properly snaps to the edges of the screen (might have some issues in the in-browser version. It can break if the window size changes, but even in extreme cases, all the text should still be visible)
• Bullets can no longer spawn on top of walls
• Some fixes to the save system (some of the stuff from the last update weren't being properly saved. That's fixed now)

Breaking changes

The tutorial is pretty busted up at this point. I, once more, have a complete tutorial overhaul in mind so I didn't bother fixing it. 

Everything has tooltips so it should be not too bad to figure out how to play. Also there's now a short text based explanation in the info panel. 

Mobile version is in an unknown state. (By mobile version I mean playing the in-browser version on your phone). I haven't looked at it in a while and have added a bunch of stuff to the game scene, so it's probably not looking too good. 

Signoff

Once more, a grand happy birthday to my game! It feels very unreal (or should I say very Unity?) to have gotten this far!

Hope you all enjoy, and please give me any and all feedback that you have!