Tonight I am releasing 2nd Beta for Jester! http://jesterblocks.net/download/ It has many improvements over the first beta: Improved load time Intro Curves Save / Export / Import replays (so you can send your best games to your friends to watch). Custom Games, including "Heritage 1", "Heritage 1 Death", "Heritage 2", "Heritage 2 Death", and "Heritage 2 Dig" The ability for you to create your own games (Level Systems) for yourself and others to play, using XML, or using a visual editor that is included with the game. Notification when an update is available. The beginnings of a story screen and some tips. Improved Key Config Screen. Improved Single Player Goals screen Rotation Skill and Shift Skill are now measured in game, and also across your own history. Backgrounds, in game and out of game. Right click for help on singleplayer screen. Most features available at the start of the game, and it is more clear what you have to do to unlock previews and the hold key. Plus a bunch of back-end stuff that's boring to hear about. In addition, there is now an OS-X version available! Unfortunately, I had to significantly change the way scores are saved, and so your saved-games from the first beta cannot be imported into the second beta. All comments, criticisms, bug reports, and feature suggestions are welcome. I hope you enjoy the game. The next big thing I'm going to be working on is online multiplayer and I'm pretty excited about that. Once I have it working, I'll release it as Beta 3. Josh
Also: I accidentally deleted all of my copies of the tar.gz of the Beta 1 for linux. If you happen to have that archive available, please send it to me so I can keep it on the website! Joshua@Jesterblocks.net
Have you considered distributed version control, or putting it up somewhere like github? I've recovered quite a few things over the years that I deleted accidentally because there was a clone of the repository on another machine. I'm more of a lurker though, and use my own server rather than github.
Making great progress on multiplayer. Still a long way to go, but very happy with the progress this past week:
Hey! Tried the game before... It's nice, and the story about the enemy gave me a good laugh I have some problems with the pieces flickering after they indicated their IRS position, not sure why. Also sometimes, when the piece hits the ground, down doesn't seem to work... I think the main technical problem I have is that holding up doesn't force 20g gravity on the pieces, it only does that upon first inputting up. Do you think it's easily replacable? Thanks in advance for your answer!
Tried the OSX version, it's nice! I tried Death mode but it felt a little slower than in the original. Are the timings different?
I personally don't like how when you hold down a key to IRS/IHS it displays the change in the Next Piece area. It's not really a problem with IRS, but with IHS especially it causes me to misdrop a lot because my brain fails to make the connection that the Next Piece changed and thinks that because I am holding Space it will give me the piece in Hold (the piece it would have given me if I hadn't held), thus causing me to drop the wrong piece. If you could make this togglable in the options (I can see how it would help beginning players) I would be eternally grateful.
There are two issues with "rotation changes preview" 1) releasing the key undoes the preview change. this is fixable by having the rotation change stick even if you release the button. 2) in authentic tetris games that contain IRS, you cannot IRS yourself to death. If you would top out if the rotation went through, then it will not happen. If you fix number 1 the way i said, then issue number 2 happens. In implementations of heritage games, irsing youself to death cannot happen, though IHSing yourslf can. SO there are three possible behaviors. 1) change of next piece is cosmetic only, (how it works now, as near as I can tell) 2) preview doesn't change, 3) preview actually does change when you pres and release button. I suggest allowing people to toggle between number 1 and 2, with three as a custom game option.
Can you tell me a bit about this? I'm not sure I understand. Sure, I will look into making that an option. I have that as a toggle for soft-drop, so I can do it for firm-drop as well.
Sweet! I am glad that there are no unexpected bugs on OSX. I haven't been able to get a macbook to test on. I think I may have adjusted these in the beta 2. It would have been about 10 months ago if I did, so I don't recall for sure. Are you able to beat death mode? My skills cap out at Master 900 (i usually die around 950-980, and I beat it once or twice), so it's difficult for me to fine tune the higher level play stuff. Along those lines, I would appreciate some help from you guys, if you're in the mood! The score medals and time medals need to be adjusted still. I worked on beginner pretty carefully, but then I just did math and guestimation for the higher levels. I know they aren't very good yet. If you guys have any suggestions for the appropriate score thresholds and time thresholds for the other 6 levels, that'd be really helpful.
Yea. Thea idea of IRS / IHS preview is just to break down some of the barriers that exist for new players and high-level play. Deep at the heart of jester is the idea of gradual progression from casual player to 20G player, trying to make it easier for people to develop 20G skills intuitively, without having to read and learn about the peculiarities of the game engine to be able to succeed. Towards that end I added the IRS / IHS preview, and I got rid of the anti-left bias a little. The rudimentary tutorials I programmed in are also trying to help with that, but I have a lot more work to do there. This is very interesting. I can mimic that behavior with no difficulty (if its preferred). What I'll do is make this an option in the level system, so the level creator can decide. I agree. Thanks for the thoughtful and detailed input.
Things are coming together very quickly in multiplayer. Here is an early iteration of the idea I hope will be Jester's primary multiplayer mode. The guy on the right has sent some attacks to the guy on the left. There's a "bomb block" falling (which is just mutated block), there are some garbage lines queued up, and hold being disabled for a bit is also queued up. (You can see what attacks are pending by the red arrows). The idea is that, as you clear lines, you can choose which attack to charge up. Depending on how strong the attack is, it might take more or less lineclears to charge. Once the attack is charged, you can activate it to send it to the other player. I put in 12 attacks for now. That may be too many, or maybe we'll want even more. I'll have a better idea after doing some play testing. Of course, the text will be replaced with sweet icon images at some point. In addition, I intend to make it possible for the game owner to enable/disable the attacks before the game starts, so the players can choose which attacks are available during the game. This system should make it easy to do handicapping as well. (We just adjust how much charge each line clear gives, based on the handicap). -- Here is one with the attacks at various levels of charges. You can tell if the attack can be sent by whether the key is black or blue. As you can see, some of them require to be completely full to send (Bomb), but others can be send in varying degrees of strength (Garbage, Color, Blink). The more you charge those, the more powerful they are, but you can decide the best strategy in game. Maybe a few rapid fire attacks will be enough to finish your opponent off sometimes. In addition, we see that our enemy has sent us some garbage lines (that red arrow), which we know will appears after this yellow block locks. Still a really long way to go before I can release this, but things have gone so quickly so far, and I'm excited to share the progress with everyone.
