ENTROPY - Update 0.2a

Thank you to everyone who has played the game or is following the project. I know it's only a few people but I am grateful to share this update with you either way.

So to start it off, unfortunately, the game had to lose the Mac OSX and Linux versions of the game. I learnt of their instabilities only through friends and due to the unavailability of testing platforms and the prototype nature of this project, I will not be able to support those platforms for now. 

So to the update, the real major deal of this update is the User Interface overhaul. I'm still not fully happy with it especially with the backend (it is a horror to manage). When I fully refine it the project should be able to move on from the UI and work on other major things I'm looking into such as the two new greyed out buttons in the main menu and in the extras menu *wink wink*

Along with the UI overhaul came the settings menu. In the settings menu, you'll be able to change a variety of settings such as:

• Themes (Not fully implemented yet)
• The new Auto-Save interval
• The display option of in-game stats (moves and time)
• The UI opacity
• The vertex colours of positive, negative and neutral values as well as the selection colour
• Horizontal and Vertical screen padding to ensure all vertices stay in the game area
• Resolution and drawing mode (windowed, borderless, fullscreen)
• Graphics settings of bloom, shadows and textures
• VSync use
• Speaker mode (Mono, Stereo, Quad, Surround, 5.1, 7.1)
• Audio controls of the Master, SFX, Music and UI

I've also introduced a new end state for the game. Before the game didn't have an end state, so now that it does you can be sure that you've finally bet the game when you do. There's more I would like to add to this with effects, sounds and general feedback so that it feels rewarding but just like everything else on my todo list, it will gradually get closer as time goes on.

You may also notice in the update before you even try to beat the game, that a new 'estimated time' thing has shown up. This is by far not accurate but it is well in the making. At the moment it is overestimating the time especially with large vertex and edge numbers but slowly it'll get better. In the future, I'm planning to make it learn from the player to make better estimations based on how efficient the player is and how long it takes to make a single move. But that's all analytics so I won't bore you on that.

Now after the 'New Game' menu and well into the gameplay, you might also notice that vertices can only go up to a maximum of 20 and minimum of -20. This is just a small change leading up to a whole bunch of gameplay improvements. As this title is a prototype I'm slowly going to play around with gameplay mechanics and variations in the game to make it more interesting. This change for min and max values is both to stop players from exploiting the numbers that the vertices could reach and to provide some interesting new experiences as limited as that may be.

Going back to the settings menu, I've also done a lot of work towards theme control. Now you may wonder what I mean by themes. Looking forward to the future of this project I would like to introduce a campaign (one of the greyed out buttons), and with this, I would like to tell stories in the campaign through the themes, which includes the background/setting of the world and the music that is played. So what you can expect in future updates is both the introduction of the campaign and theme controls.  I've got a fair amount planned especially working with the idea of Entropy so I hope you look forward to that.

So that's pretty much it as far as this update goes. There were some other minor things like bug fixes and performance improvements but otherwise, that's it. So I hope you enjoy the new update and I look forward to releasing the next one already. Cheers!