AMAZE - 26 - Done!

Changelog:

• Finished the last 2 levels.
• Finished the music for the Title Screen and Zone 2.
• Added two difficulties: Casual and Challenge.
• When loading a new game, the correct music should now play.
• Changing the volume will now have an immediate effect.
• Added some bonus pickups to almost every stage.

Here's the total completion of the remaining parts of AMAZE:

• Levels: 30/30: 100%
• Tilesets: 6/6: 100%
• Music: 7/7: 100%
• Total: 100%

So, that's it! The game is finished!

I'm glad to be done two weeks ahead of schedule, though feels rather odd. Normally, I'm several months(or more) off! Anyways, this will give me a couple of weeks to run tests on the game, and maybe tweak things a bit.

Unlike most of my projects, I will also be publicly releasing the source code at launch. You'll probably be seeing me do this much more often from now on. I think it's time to start giving back to the open source community. In fact, I will(hopefully) have the next versions of AMAZE be open source from the start, letting people see my progress much more closely and even contributing if they wish!

If you read my last post, you might notice above that there's no mention of a Hardcore mode. That's because I've decided to change how the difficulties work. Challenge is the same as Hardcore was supposed to be-exactly as the game was up until now. Casual has been changed a bit. Instead of adding checkpoints, I've decided to start Casual games with the maximum number of lives. I decided to change this mainly because of scope issues. Implementing checkpoints alone would be a pain, but then placing and testing them for every level in the game would be a nightmare. It's a feature that I really want to add, but that I should have started long ago for there to be any chance of it getting in. Anyways, if Casual is too easy, or Challenge too difficult, you can change the setting at any time. Note that you only get the extra lives if you start on Casual, and switching to Challenge will not remove them.

Finally, I'm going to take a short break next week, and I'll be back once AMAZE is released. I want to make some changes to this site, which will hopefully make it a bit nicer. If I'm fast enough, I might even manage to launch those changes with the release of the game!

For now though, goodbye!