Hello! It has been quite a while. Too long, really.

It is finally time for another update to Addlemoth! It's a DROD-inspired turn-based puzzle game that has a demo which you can play in your browser. Give it a try!

So, 2023 turned out to be, uh, quite the year for me, personally, and, unfortunately, I had to effectively put Addlemoth related development on the backburner. It wasn't for lack of trying or interest, believe me.

That being said, things are starting to move again, and I figured it's time to give an update on what's been happening here since the last update from.. April of last year. Oops. Has it been that long? I feel like I wrote that just a couple weeks ago...

I deeply thank all of you for your patience.

So what's new?

New mechanic: Campfires!

Once you collect all the debris on the stage, you can pick one campfire position and start a nice cozy fire. Some creatures might even react to it! Everyone needs a nice warm nap sometimes. Maybe all the time...

Additionally, I did a bunch of improvements to the visuals of the cave tileset. The cave's mushroom tiles were not working out for me, so I redrew them as viney overgrowth. They're a little blockier than I would like, but I think they communicate 'these are walls' much better and are much more pleasing to the eye without being distracting.

As promised a while ago, I have added wake warnings to tiles that would cause the hounds to wake. This is logic you can intuit easily enough, but a little extra help indicating goes a long way towards understanding quicker and making fewer mistakes. I opted to have it be relatively subtle and non-distracting, so that it won't be a bother if you're moving around quickly and it won't distract you from thinking the puzzles out.

This also comes with a change of mechanics. Previously, hounds would wake from any movement within two tiles. Now, they'll wake from any movement on any non-dirt tiles within the same range, or from stepping on a neighboring tile. This is more flexible for the designer, and helps communicate that, yes, I'm going to treat those tile types differently for some mechanics. (And already did in the demo! Did you notice that Peridot can't raise skeletons on the grass?)

All of the existing maps have been updated for these with minimal changes; the old verification replays still work, unchanged, for nearly all of them.

HEAVYVIPER has put in sketches of all the area music of the game, and it is coming together nicely.

We had some feedback from the demo that the one theme in there, while good, would get a little grating after a while. Which is completely fair and understandable! We've done a bunch of thinking on this, and the tracks for the main game will be a little softer, amongst other things.

Excited for y'all to hear this stuff!

I picked up a Steam Deck last year as a portable computing solution, but found it pretty comfy to use and even do some development work on the go on.

Unfortunately, even with a fresh build, the game didn't quite work out of the box and had a lot of, honestly, strange issues that needed to be ironed out. Like the aspect ratio being wrong in this picture; since fixed. One input-related issue puzzled me so much I had to write an entire debug display infrastructure in game just to figure it out, but we're all good now.

As a consequence of all this, I also improved the gamepad support across the board, making it feel much more natural to play.

The map editor in particular saw a significant amount of improvement, as I had apparently only ever used it with keyboard+mouse before. (...And yes, the map editor will be available for users eventually. Promise.)

On the bright side, I have over 7 hours of battery life with the game, which seems sufficient for even long trips!

A new stage, just because.

So the big question that remains right now is "how far along are we?"

• Gameplay code is DONE. Not going to change substantially except to add new entities. It's really solid.
• Dialogue scripts are about halfway done; need some editing and cleaning up, but the story has taken form.
• Tilesets are around 80+% complete.
• Art of all the objects have static sprites, but many animations are needed. Likely will chip away at them as the game progresses.
• Stages have been progressing slowly and are being slotted in as appropriate.

Which is a pretty good place to be. Currently, we need new stages more than anything right now, and that's been my main focus.

I'd like to donate some time to improving the game's rendering a bit. Back when I first started, I was just learning to draw pixel art, so I set a rule for myself to try to not solve art problems with code/shaders. This mean that the renderer is very minimalistic in what it can do. I think I've improved enough at this point that I can lax up on that restriction a bit and add some simple lighting and particle effects to make the game look a little less shabby. Though perhaps that's part of its charm? Hmm.

My current goal is to get to around the first half of the game completed and then start closed playtesting. If there's anything I learned from the demo's 3-4, it's that playtesting is essential.

And I do want to be more present in general in terms of development, and I'm planning on doing some weekly streams over on my twitch to get some dedicated progress on this front. C'mon by! Schedule not quite decided yet.

Smaller, unrelated personal things:

- I'm on the Thinky Awards jury!

https://thinkygames.com/news/and-the-nominees-for-the-inaugural-thinky-awards-ar...

I wasn't actually expecting to be picked for this, but I am on the jury for the Thinky Awards! It's a community effort to pick the best puzzley themed games of the year.

There were so many good games released throughout the past year! Puzzle fans eating really well.

Let's endeavor to have Addlemoth in the 2024 awards!

- I had an interview with IndieGamesOfCohost!

https://cohost.org/IndieGamesOfCohost/post/2519638-indie-interviews-ma

This kinda came out of nowhere! I was semi-active on cohost last year, but just couldn't dedicate enough time for writing things. An indie games focused account requested an interview about what goes into making puzzle games!

- Once again, thank you!

It has been a long, long year, and, so far, 2024 is looking a lot brighter for the project than the past year was.

As usual, if you want to contact me, you may find me at:

• https://icosahedron.website/@mauve Mastodon
• https://cohost.org/mauve cohost
• https://www.twitch.tv/mauvecow Twitch

You may also find me on the Addlemoth Discord. I will be posting updates and news type things to my Twitter but I won't be present there otherwise.

See you soon, hopefully!