With an uncontrollable amount of excitement and even a little bit of pride, I am thrilled to announce the launch of V0.12 of SnakeByte! The game is finally reaching a state in which I can safely present it to other people and even let them play it in order to gather feedback. The past two weeks I've mainly been focusing on playability of the game, making sure that at least the controls feel tight and that you can customize the input in a match. Obviously, you already knew this was coming, because you were following the publicly available Snakebyte Trello board, right? You know what? Let me tell you the whole story...

Introduced input selection

In a game in which precision controls are required for the game to be fun, it's obviously as important to make sure that these controls and inputs can be regulated to the player's liking. In V0.12 you can now select which player plays with whatever control scheme they'd like to use, e.g. Arrows or WASD. AI is an option here as well, so you can play with up to three CPUs! When controller support arrives in one of the next versions, choosing controllers will be included in this feature as well. If you're playing all by yourself, it's possible to play with either WASD or arrows at the same time. Remember kids, be wary when using arrows...

Visual enhancements

In a world of on/off graphics dominated by green visuals, the bits can't be missed of course. We like them so much that we even let them slip into the Main Menu's void for a little peek. Unfortunately, we couldn't control the stream of bits that followed, so now it's raining bits in the main menu panels. They even got to the newly introduced splash screen for a bit. Oops.

Tweaks

Tinkering with parameters can really be like meditation. Especially for me. I could get lost in the endless void of tweaking values and fine-tuning the balance of the game. This week, the following things have been tweaked:

• The 'edge grind' particle system has a bit more weight to it and starts one frame later
• More screenshake. It's always the answer, no matter the question.
• Tweaked some of the level star requirements to make it a bit more difficult

Fixes

No software without bugs. The game is made up with enough 0's and 1's to give any OS a StackOverflow in the morning, so hunting and squashing bugs isn't always easy with SnakeByte. Yet, through perseverance it has become quite a successful mission these past two weeks. The following issues have bit the dust:

• The patterns that need to be collected in-game are now visible right from the start of the countdown
• Fixed the 'Esc' key not working in puzzle mode
• Fixed the broken BGM/SFX sliders 
• The starting arrows for CPU players are now hidden
• Fixed the countdown timer sometimes continuing the countdown past 0

What's coming up next week?

The goal of the next sprint is to make it to V0.13, obviously. For this version, a lot of new content needs to be made. I'd like to focus a lot on making more challenging levels with the existing puzzle elements. Let's see what's on the menu for next week:

• At least 10 new puzzles
• Improving the 'AI' of the CPU players (right now, it's more 'Aimless Intelligence')
• Polish the 'BitShift' puzzle element
• Polishing the game feel (got various nice little touches in store)
• Various bug fixes of course

If you'd like to be completely up-to-date and follow the whole development process of SnakeByte, just take a look at the public Trello board. Or follow me on Twitter @FerdieQO. Easy, right? Hope to see you next week and enjoy, have a wonderful day and remember.. Have a BIT of fun!