Okay, I finally have this in a state where it's ready to be listed again. I've added a whole new single-player mode called "Adventure Mode" with multiple levels with different kinds of goals. Some are timed, others are based on points. Some reward careful, strategic play, others grabbing things as fast as possible. I've tried to make it clear to the player which kind of level they're on, but if you find it confusing, let me know in the comments.
After each level in Adventure mode, the player is rewarded with 0-3 gems depending on their performance in the level. The goals are set so that 1 gem should be fairly easy, though I don't really have any beginners to test it on, so its tough to gauge that. The 3 gem goals are set to be very difficult, to give an impression of the range of difficulty in the game, since it is so short right now. I think this game would be easy to dismiss as simple and just based on luck, so I've set these goals high to communicate to the player the kinds of scores that are possible to encourage the player to engage with the game's mechanics. So far, the difference that playing strategically will have on your score is not as consistently large as I'd like them to be, but I have some ideas to solve that and I'll talk more about it in a future devlog.
At any rate, if you really find the goals are set too high, you can lower them by changing the difficulty in the Adventure Mode menu. It won't have any other effect. I think different people will want to gauge their progress in different ways. "Full Panic" is the default difficulty setting. "Impossible" is just Full Panic +25% and getting 3 gems is, in some cases, actually impossible.
One the surface, the game probably doesn't look very different because a lot of what I've been working on has been "under the hood". I've been learning a lot of new coding techniques like using events more to reduce spaghetti code, making my code and objects more modular and less dependent on each other. I think this has made for a better foundation that will scale well and support further development without becoming unwieldy over time. Adding new content has, so far, gone really well, and I'm finding adding new features and fixing bugs doesn't cause as many things to break. So, although there's nothing radically new, I think the work that I've done will allow for much faster content creation going forward. I'm already finding
The old game is included, with minor changes, in the form of "Classic Mode" for anyone who enjoyed it or wants to play multiplayer. I won't be making any changes to it, but I do have ideas for future multiplayer modes that I'd like to implement, so if that's a thing you'd be interested in, let me know in the comments.
I'll be posting a part 2 to this devlog soon, but from now on I'll try to write them more regularly rather than in a huge info-dump.