Patreon Weekly #31 - Jan 5th 2020

Hey Patrons, happy new year!

Due to family obligations, other work, and a cold, I haven't managed to get much Shattered work done this week, but I still have a few things to share!

Work on the DM-300 fight continues. There's no major news to share here as it's mostly just some tieing together and refinement of what I've already shared. I'm hoping to get beta-3.0 with a reworked DM-300 fight out sometime this coming week. You can see an example of its digging ability on the video above, It has a nasty habit of sneaking up on you with it!

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I spent some time this week working on a 2020 blog as well, which I also hope to release next week! I ended up being fairly tied up with other work in the first 2/3 of 2019, and so didn't get as much time to implement things as I wanted during that year. Because of that the 2020 blog is going to be a bit similar to the 2019 one, but not entirely. Here are some of the major new additions I plan to talk about:

- While there hasn't been any significant progress on music since 2019, some new sfx are actually currently in development! I might try to put some of them in the update following 0.8.0, and you'll be the first to actually hear them.
- As the game is now fully running through LibGDX, moving forward with new platforms is now possible. I'm committing to releasing on itch.io in the relatively near future, and hopefully I can materialize some plans for Steam and iOS later in the year as well. I'm also going to spend time looking into desktop-specific interface improvements, to make better use of a mouse and greater screen real-estate.
- The 2020 blog is also the first time I'm going to mention something very important: v1.0.0. I don't have a specific content plan for this update, whenever it will be, but rather v1.0.0 represents when Shattered will finally be in a state where I can say it is an actual released game, and not still in a beta state. It's hard to say whether or not the game will reach v1.0.0 this year, but I'd certainly like to push toward it. To be clear, v1.0.0 is not likely to be the final update, just the first time I'm willing to call the game 'finished' if I have to.
- Under stretch goals I'm going to mention weeklies for the first time. I don't know how I might implement these specifically, but i think they are definitely a great feature to look into adding after 1.0.0. They would operate similar to dailies/weeklies in other roguelike games, with everyone getting to play the same dungeon, and being ranked against eachother based on their score.

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Once beta-3.0 is out I want to move on to improvements to DK and Yog before full release. DM-300 has sort of turned into a full-scale rework, and I don't want to give those to DK and Yog just yet, as I want to get 0.8.0 moving toward release, and I'd like to revisit them later anyway. They will still receive changes, but they likely wont be as big in scope as the DM-300 changes.