Text Input | Patreon Weekly #110

Hey Patrons!

Here are the results from Patreon Poll #19:
Gateway Traps: 79%
Geyser Traps:  76%
Tar Traps: 62%
Sprouting Traps:  58%
Giga Flock Traps:  48%
Gateway and Geyser traps got strong support, Tar and Sprouting traps got more moderate support, and Giga Flock traps got weaker support. Based on this I will be implementing Gateway and Geyser traps into v0.9.4. I may also implement Tar and Sprouting traps, either in 0.9.4 or in a future update.

Work on v0.9.4 has been progressing very well this week! A lot of changes were more technical in nature, but I still have some things to show:

Finishing up on iOS

A fair bit of time was spent this last week getting one final feature working on iOS: text input!

While that may not seem very impressive, there was a fair bit of work that went into this. Previously text input was Android only, and essentially piggybacked on Android’s UI components. I’ve now switched to an approach that uses libGDX’s UI components instead. This results in text input that is multiplatform (desktop too!) and is much better integrated with the game’s UI!

I also spent some time working on hammering out some of the remaining bugs in the iOS code. The game currently has some seemingly random crashes in graphics code, and I suspect the culprit is a memory leak. I just released TestFlight-1.6 which includes some memory management optimizations that will hopefully fix this crash. If not, I’ll take another look at things and try again with a 1.7 release. Android and Desktop will also get these memory optimizations in 0.9.4.

Other Work

Aside from iOS, I also made some progress on other aspects of v0.9.4 last week.

One of those things is Spectral Necromancers! They’re fully implemented (minus some sprite polish), and work quite well. Each wraith is set at a reduced power level (as if they were on floor 4), but spectral necromancers can make quite a few of them! You really want to get in close and deal with them quickly, before the wraiths get a chance to stack a bunch of damage. Of course, damage AOE or lots of armor are both very effective against them as well.

If all goes well I hope to be finished with almost all of the miscellaneous changes in v0.9.4 by this time next week, which will let me focus on the three major things: alchemy additions/rebalancing, armor ability balancing, and targeted new player experience tweaks.