- Update 1.16.3 - 29 June 2022
Hey Everybody! Today's update includes a minor fix for a bug impacting a load game scenario. It also includes our first proof-of-concept work for cross-project code sharing of unity-dependent code ;) Thanks, Chani. ======== 1.16.3 * fix bug where loading a game that was saved in MGL during PLAY caused transition logic to fail * refactor project to use common unity library project
- Update 1.16.2 - 10 June 2022
Hey Everybody! Today's change contains an update to the game's engine & some bug fixes. Thanks, Chani. ======== 1.16.2 * add console command "list" to List items * add console command "gimme" to Add item(s) to inventory (during PLAY only) * add console command "use" to Use an item (during PLAY only) 1.16.1 * fix bug where buying back treasure items sold costs half of what they were sold for * fix bug where save game process wasn't finished before growing a new maze 1.16.0 * update Unity 2020.3.25f1->2021.3.2f1 * update materials & lighting (we get real-time shadows for point lights again!) * fix bug where sometimes items didn't get destroyed after being picked up * fix bug where sometimes player avatar was spawned multiple times
- Ra Ra Ra! - 25 March 2022
Hey Everybody! After over a year since our last update, we're publishing a new update for Prismatic Maze today! The change includes a complete overhaul of our underlying state engine, a complete redesign of the mini-map system, the addition of a playback system with pace controls for maze growth and bug fixes. You probably won't notice a lot of difference after this change, even though a ton of the back end systems were completely torn apart and rebuilt. The game should play a little smoother and faster, especially during maze creation. Thanks, Chani. ------- 1.15.8 * add console command: pop * fix bug where Player was sometimes unable to pickup Pigment heart after saving during PLAY * fix bug in console commands that take screenshots which sometimes took screenshots with console open * fix bug where unhandled exception was thrown by Ghosts when saving while PowerPellet was active 1.15.…
- Smooth Operator Update! - 27 February 2020
Prismatic Maze - Smooth Operator Update! Hey Everybody! A new update for Prismatic Maze is available! This is a polish update, in which we make improvements to menu and scene transitions. Not to be outdone, Pigments started showing their heartbeat through their lights... Smoothing Things Out Menus now transition smoothely after redesigning our menu system. Menu transition logic has been redesigned to avoid frame stuttering and transition animations make interacting with the menus more fluid. Scene Transitions This is a thing we've wanted to do for a long time. When transitioning to or from Playing mode, we've added scene transitions. For our first big transition, we're building a completely new maze to fill the screen in a classic top-down 2d view. When a transition is triggered, we're walking the new maze from start to finish, following each branch and revealing tiles along the path. O…
- Foliage Update! - 29 January 2020
Prismatic Maze - Foliage Update! Hey Everybody! A new update for Prismatic Maze is available. This update adds trees to empty spaces, converts Christmas effects into an Easter egg & completely revamps the rendering pipeline affecting colors, lighting, shadows. Meanwhile, we're working towards an iOS release for the game. New Content Some time ago, we added empty spaces to maps - something like dropping some sand into your petri dish. Pigments decided to celebrate this with decorations for Christmas, and after the holidays some seeds were left over. This caused trees to spring up in their places. It seems that the Pigments affect what types of trees grow in these areas now. Primary colors seem to be pretty normal deciduous & conifer trees but Orange and Purple are a little bit stranger and Black seems to kill its trees outright. Updated Content The trees came with a full rework of the re…
- White Christmas Update! - 25 December 2019
Prismatic Maze - White Christmas Update! Merry Christmas! Since the last update, we've been working on adding support for MacOS. We are releasing our first Mac build on Christmas Eve :D If you already have the game on Steam, you will be able to install it on your Mac using Steam. If you have been unable to play the game because you only have a Mac, now is a great time to buy it as it is on sale during Steam's Winter sale. To celebrate the holidays, we also added Snow and Christmas decorations! We've also updated the game logo ;) Next stop, iOS! Thanks, Chani. ---------- 20191224 - Christmas Update * add support for MacOS! * add Snow* fill empty tiles with Christmas Flair
- Halloween Update! - 31 October 2019
Prismatic Maze - Halloween Update! Hey Everybody! Happy Halloween! Happy Steam Sale! Enjoy some Happy Ghost Hunting! A lot has happened in the last month :) In-Game Updates We set up a feature to show in-game patch updates early on in the month, but it kept spitting out what looked like some kind of feedback information. We tuned that until it resolved into words. It looks like there is some kind of conversation going on. We filtered it down to show in the game - looks like some kind of task summary? Here is what it said a few days ago: Experiment continues. Our task is introduction of caution. We teach Pigment play time. Pigment learns grow monster, birth monster, decay. Enter Ghost. Ghost learns loyalty, modality, vulnerability, off, patrol, chase, eat Explorer. Explorer learns death. Explorer finds power, inverts relationship. Explorer learns eat Ghost. Ghost learns death, fear, retr…
- Enter Darkness! - 26 September 2019
Prismatic Maze - Enter Darkness! Hey Everybody! We've been watching the ongoing evolving maze experiment for a while now... A months after the Butterflies showed up, Pigments started growing coins. Soon after that, they started growing consumable items. In the last month, we've been seeing Pigments begin contracting Darkness. This affliction somehow blots out the sun within their territory and causes them to grow lamps and consumable light items. Meanwhile, an Item Merchant has been attracted to the coins and set up shop in between mazes. Teaser Darkness & Light Over the last few months, we've watched the mazes created by Pigment creatures get richer. Until recently, there hasn't been any down-side to letting maps bake longer because the longer they grow, the more coins and items they seem to acquire. Meanwhile, the little boxy creatures we've been using to explore the mazes started tra…
- Consumable Update! - 28 August 2019
Prismatic Maze - Consumable Update Hey Everybody! This is a much bigger update than many of the previous ones, and it introduces some exciting new game mechanics including Consumabel Items and Active Effects! This enables some things we've been working towards for some time. Items in the game were originally only used as ingredients for new maps, but the intention was always to add more items over time. Our philosophy with items was to follow the things should do things principle and make each item actually do something significant. In order to do that, we needed to lay a lot of groundwork and build systems to enable the types of behaviors we wanted to play with. https://cdn.steampulse.org/steam/asset?u=https%3A%2F%2Fsteamcdn-a.akamaihd.net%2Fsteamcommunity%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fclans%2F34703410%2F7aaf21f0c037adb40cfbb5a5082be6004f22aee8.gif https://cdn.steampulse.org/steam/asset?u=https%3A%2F%2Fsteamcdn-a.akamaihd.net%2Fsteamcommunity%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fclans%2F34703410%2Fd86ad80ec9f2ac1bb3ec7c4e18fad7%25E2%2580%25A6
- Coin Update! - 29 July 2019
Prismatic Maze is now in Latvian! May the streets be paved with Coins! Hey Everybody! With this update, Pigment Creatures now generate Coins as they grow & spread them out inside their Mazes. Players can pick up coins like other items in the Maze, adding them to their collection upon completing the Maze. Coins are part of a growing lists of collectible Treasure items. Coins come in five denominations - Iron, Copper, Silver, Gold & Platinum. Each Pigment is born with variable DNA traits. The Prosperity trait controls how likely they are to generate coins each time they grow. As they get older, they generate higher denomination coins. Coins are also a form of in-game currency that will be used in various ways in future updates. Hello Latvia! Also, our friend Pēteris Lediņš has translated the game into Lativan! Steam doesn't even have a language selection for Latvian, but maybe they will a…
- Butterflies! - 20 June 2019
Prismatic Maze is now in German! Hey Everybody! This is a really exciting update. In this one, we added German Localization with translation help from Noah Wilson, someone I met through Discord. This was so cool... when I released the game initially, a friend of my nephew, Supertestsubject, got in touch with me to volunteer to playtest the game. When I started working on localization, he recommended I talk to his friend Noah who knew German. Noah corrected all the google-translate placeholders I was using and provided full text translations for the longer text and provided updates as I added more content over time. Both Supertestsubject and Noah are in their early teens... blows my mind. Thank you guys so much for your help :D We also added empty spaces to maps prior to growing them, so now the maze doesn't fill every tile from top-to-bottom, end-to-end. This adds some obsticles for the…
- Localization Update I - 5 June 2019
Prismatic Maze is now in Bulgarian! Hey Everybody! In this update, we added Localization and updated some of the Item and Inventory mechanics. For Localization, we added a localization framework and localized all the game menus into Bulgarian. My amazing wife Stella is from Bulgaria and so her language beats out all the rest :D Special thanks to her and her brother Hristo for the translations. Also, in this update, we expose item counts in the Inventory menus. Items always had counts, but those numbers weren't visible, so the counts for all the items you found in an existing games are preserved. We also changed the drag mechanics from take-all to take-one. Items used in new recipes do not get consumed. We also changed how Tools Inventory works. Previously, your Storage Inventory was split into Tools and Storage containers in the Stage Select menu automatically. Now, those inventories ar…
- Resolution Update - 23 May 2019
Hey Everybody! This update redesigns how UI Menus and dialogs are positioned in the game. It's a seemingly-small update that nontheless touches a lot of game components. If you have been playing at 1080p, the changes you will see look like the screenshots included in this post. If you've been playing at any other resolution... there is a decent chance that the 'before' picture looks much worse and the after picture looks pretty much the same as these. The reason things looked different at other resolutions was because I was using pixel-specific sizes and positioning pretty much everywhere. Unity seems to prefer pixel-specific adjustments and it does work well in some cases but when you change resolutions all the relative positions are different and things can look pretty messed up. With this update, the UI should look pretty much the same at supported resolution. I have been building up…
- Color Cloud Update - 12 May 2019
Hey Everybody! I'm really excited about this update. I got to add something I'd been trying to fit in for a long time - organic color variations in the Pigment Color areas :) Now, tiles and walls in colored pigment sections will have a mottled organic color variation instead of one consistent color scheme throughout. Technically, this is accomplished by using a diamond-square fractal algorithm seeded with elements on the map like pigment creature locations. The screenshots below show a side-by-side comparison of the same map before and after this change. Screenshots: https://cdn.steampulse.org/steam/asset?u=https%3A%2F%2Fsteamcdn-a.akamaihd.net%2Fsteamcommunity%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fclans%2F34703410%2F180462858131aa092aaf337fe891d4f26462021c.png https://cdn.steampulse.org/steam/asset?u=https%3A%2F%2Fsteamcdn-a.akamaihd.net%2Fsteamcommunity%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fclans%2F34703410%2F98475aa47acd0266fc791acf1b629501c253b8e6.png I also redesigned how dialog menus worked - adding functionality to dismiss the men…
- Fourth Week Update - 27 April 2019
Hey Everybody! Today, I put out the fourth weekly update for Prismatic Maze. This week, I focused on areas of map creation that can cause it to fail. Map creation for mazes doesn't strictly have to be very complicated, but in this game it is quite complex due to the use of organic interactions between various components. There is a timekeeper element that advances time in intervals. Pigments are live creatures that exist on the map at the location where their seed is placed and they listen for time updates. Each time the clock is advanced, Pigments wake up and act - growing territory outward from their seed location to their full size based on their current age and genetic characteristics (like proliferation, aggressiveness, prosperity, fertility, etc.), spawn treasure and create interior maze walls in their territory. At the end of the growth cycle, pigments create doors (and corridors…
- Third Week Update - 21 April 2019
Hey Everybody! Today, we sent out our third weekly update for Prismatic Maze. We are working on a number of different improvements for scorekeeping. In this update, we begin capturing completed mazes in game state, decorate those mazes in the load section of the Stage Select menu and expose a filter in that menu to show/hide completed maps. This should make it easier to work with a save game that has a large number of maps and will feed into statistics and scorekeeping improvements to come. This update also includes partial gamepad support, specifically directional movement during the maze exploration portion of the game. For full gamepad support, we still need to rework the menus and minimap controls. I will be working on that in the near future. Some other changes are 'under the hood' - working towards the addition of more items, better item management, further scorekeeping improvemen…
- Second Week Update - 12 April 2019
Hey Everybody! Prismatic Maze has been out for two weeks and I'm mostly been working on stability and usability updates in that time. This week's update includes: adding an option to 'Continue previous game' from the Main Menuauto-sorting inventory menusadding an on-screen indicator during save/loadimprovements to pigment maze generation algorithms and early-game treasure dropslots of minor UI tweaksimprovements in error handling during maze creationfoundational work preparing for a big item content push in the upcoming weeks Stay tuned for exciting things, Chani. ------------- 20190412 * Add ability to continue last loaded game to Main Menu * Auto Sort Inventory menus * Add on-screen indicator for Save * Randomize initial Pigment Step Direction * Adjust some button sizes * Adjust text padding in Creating New Maze menu * change new blueprint logic to always add size_16 in size_8 maps *…
- First Week Update - 5 April 2019
First content update! This update changes presentation of items in the Stage Select menu, splitting items you've acquired into Tools & Storage. Tools include Magnifying Glass & Microscope so far, both of which change the way you see maps being created when they're growing.. Storage includes items used as Ingredients for new maps - sizes, seeds, time, etc.. The update disables click-to-move pathfinder, which was on by default. This functionality will be unlocked by items in the near future. It was originally meant to mitigate frustration with backtracking, but I think we can make much better use of the mechanic. Having it always on makes short path traversal less enjoyable. A few days ago, we put out some bug fixes early and included Auto-Save with those. This prevents losing progress when you close the game without saving after finishing a maze. More to come next week :) ---------- 2019…
- Updates & Fixes - 3 April 2019
A few players hit some issues over the launch weekend, so we jumped on those with a batch of resiliency improvements and bug fixes. Sorry for anyone who hit one of these and had a bad experience with the game because of it. The biggest issue was a rare error in maze creation, but it was causing save games to not work correctly. This update should resolve that by detecting such issues and handling them much better. Also includes a few small changes and improvements. === 20190403b * update map thumbnail in loading menu when exiting maze to Stage Select * add auto-save * bubble up errors in map creation logic, fail gracefully in creating new map dialog by switching back to Stage Select * validate maps on loading from stage select, fail gracefully if map is invalid by annotating image & staying in Stage Select 20190402 * prevent activating item description dialog when minimap is expanded *…
- Prismatic Maze is Live! - 29 March 2019
Prismatic Maze is available now! Buy It! Play it! Share It! Love It!
