0.0712

The monsters you feed are about 1% cuter than they used to be!

Before	After

They've now got some fancy colored bellies and more granular shadows instead of being just a big dark blob. ...The shadows change as they grow bigger. It was difficult getting the graphics to work and those two things took me the whole week! I'm sorry!

Milestone v0.07

What changed this week?

More awesome music! Three new tracks added to the soundtrack courtesy of Pete Ellison of Diskowarp Records.

Food appears when clearing boxes! Clearing snack and cake boxes now results in candy, chocolate, cookies, fruit and sometimes cake. Try to make lots of boxes to see the cool new food items!

What changed in milestone v0.07?

• HTML5 support -- try the game out at itch.io! https://poobslag.itch.io/turbo-fat
• Android support -- try out the APK if you have an Android device!
• Gamepad support -- pull out a joystick and give it a shot!
• Vastly improved performance -- the game starts in about 100 ms, instead of 10 seconds, and should run on any device!
• More music -- three new awesome tunes!
• Fun new puzzle graphics -- check out the new sticky frosting, food items and leafy poofs!

0.0628

Just a little visual polish this week! Nothing major -- just trying to get things cleaned up and polished before I start adding tons of new functionality in July.

Frosting explosions are messier now! Frosting now sticks to the walls and background of the playfield. Make lots of boxes to turn the stage into a sticky sugary mess.

Squish moves are telegraphed a little better. Holding 'soft drop' to squeeze pieces through small gaps makes them wiggle, sweat, sqeak and squirt out frosting. Before, it could be a little confusing how holding the key made nothing happen until the piece suddenly teleported! Hopefully it's easier to understand now.

I fixed a few other minor bug fixes and tweaks too, like #406 and #388 - thanks for reporting them! I'm trying to get things cleaned up before July when I start adding tons of new functionality again.

0.0621

Android support, HTML5 support, and a massive performance bump!! Wow, I was busy!

If you download the .apk you should be able to try the game out on Android, including some new touchscreen controls. I played around with these a lot and I think they feel really good! There's six different button layouts to choose from in the settings, I'm curious which one is your favorite. Let me know if you have other ideas for how the controls should work!

If you want to try the game in HTML5 you can head over to itch.io and try it there. I was originally going to wait until the v0.011 milestone in November but the guy doing the music for the game is on a Mac and didn't have a way to play the game. ...So, yes it'll maybe go on Newgrounds, Kongregate, and a million other places some day, but for now just itch.io!

The game's performance has been massively improved, mostly by shrinking and getting rid of a lot of graphics. The game used to take about 10 seconds to start up, and on my old Ubuntu laptop it could barely crunch along at 5-10 frames per second. Now it takes about a tenth of a second to start up, and my old Ubuntu laptop can run the thing no problem. Hopefully more of you can play Turbo Fat now!

I also put in some little gameplay tweaks. You can flip pieces now by pressing both rotate buttons! But the 3 dan course has been redesigned to be faster, longer, and even more brutal -- and, AND you no longer get credit for clearing a rank course if you also lose. You have to survive until the end! Good luck!

0.0614

Goodbye 3D, we will miss you! This release replaces the 3D overworld with a 2D overworld. This was necessary for the game to be published to the web, because of some limitations of how Godot 3.2.1 works with HTML5. Godot 4.0 will overhaul this side of things, so maybe my next web-based game can be in 3D! But, not this one.

There are some mechanical and visual improvements to puzzle mode! Visually, you'll notice little leaf poofs when you're serving up vegetables, and the food will be a spinach green. Mmm, veggies! Mechanically, the ultra/sprint difficulties won't lock your piece as quickly, and J/L pieces will rotate on top of each other easier when starting JLO-boxes. Let me know if the game gets too easy, I can always speed it up!

The game launches faster and needs less ram. Compared to v0.0607, it launches in 72% of the time and uses 75% as much memory. These numbers should improve even more in the next release -- I'm trying to nail any performance issues before I start increasing the scope of the game. This game is going to have hundreds of different characters in it! I need to make sure they'll all fit!!!

0.0607

To address concerns about food waste, I've made it so all your leftovers are force fed to the last customer of the night. ...I can't decide if I've solved a problem or made a new, worse problem! I've also added gamepad support, so plug in a controller and give it a shot! I haven't documented the controls anywhere, so hit random buttons and see what they do. Sorry!

This release mostly involved a lot of boring code improvements and bug fixes as a part of "Refactoring Week". Refactoring is what developers call it when we sit on our ass instead of doing actual work. No, no, just kidding, it was really important! The code is much cleaner now. I had this enormous 630-line poorly-named 'customer' object which was used for dudes in the game, including the main character who is certainly not a customer! It's now a slightly less horrible 460-line better-named 'creature' object. ...It doesn't smell good! But it smells better than it used to.

Milestone v0.06

What changed this week?

Hot new toe-tapping tunes! Pete Ellison of DiskoWarp Records is providing a bopping soundtrack for our game. This new release includes a first draft of two of his tracks -- many more will be introduced, and the full soundtrack will be made available for purchase on his Bandcamp page.

Try out the redesigned Practice mode! You can pick between five exciting game modes, including a new 'rank mode' if you're ultra hardcore and 'sandbox mode' if you're maybe only a little hardcore. It keeps track of your daily top scores so you no longer have to worry about that jerk who finished Ultra mode in 2 minutes last week. Who cares about them!

The tutorial has also been expanded to teach Snack Stacks which is an elementary technique for making those scores climb. Let me know what you think about the tutorial! Hopefully it's not too hard. I know it's a little hard!

The save system has been overhauled so you should no longer lose your save data when upgrading. As usual there's also been some tweaks to puzzle mode - the starting pieces have changed, the piece timings are a little different, and the goal display has changed.

Wow, that was a big week!

What changed in milestone v0.06?

This marks the second major milestone release of TurboFat! Eight more milestones await us until version 1.00, you can read more about this on the Milestones page in the wiki. The following major features have been added since the previous milestone release (v0.04):

• A vertical slice of the overworld portion of the game! Talk to people, solve puzzles and earn money.
• Music! There are currently two songs but there will be more.
• A tutorial for new players! Make boxes, perform squish moves, and learn the basic features of the game.
• A level editor! Create your own scenarios with different level layouts and rules.
• Over 20 new levels! There are 18 new scenarios in the all-new rank mode available in the practice mode. There's also a new sandbox mode, and a few levels available on the overworld.
• Menus and settings! It's boring, but you need to be able to navigate different game modes and enable/disable sounds and music. Now you can do that sort of stuff.

0.0524

Scenarios and tutorials! This release adds a more fleshed-out scenario system which allows for different scoring systems, rules which decide when you win/lose, what breaks your combo, and other things. You can read more about what's currently implemented and what I have planned in the Level Editor wiki page.

A new tutorial will launch when you first start up Turbo Fat. This walks you through the basics of clearing lines, making boxes, and performing squish moves. Just the most basic of the basics! I'd like to add more complex tutorials later.

In most modes, you no longer lose if you top out. Topping out still hurt your rank, but you get three tries. Get back in there! Never give up!

0.0517

Flashing lights, splooshy colors, and big money! This release includes some "pizzazz" type improvements to the puzzle mode. Make and clear boxes to create big colorful painty blobs! Wow, they're so pretty! Build a big combo to generate some cool flashy lights! Wow, they're so bright and distracting! And the game tallies up all your money at the end - oooh, I served so many people! I'm going to be rich!

I've made some other QoL improvements to puzzle mode. ...or perhaps regressions if you're a purist! The "T-spin triple" and similar cool moves have been removed in lieu of new "snack kicks" and other piece kicks which lend themselves better to this game. I've redone the grading system so instead of a grade like "8.7 C-", you'll get a grade like "87 A-". The lowest letter grade is a B-, below that you just get an empty '-' grade. ...The purpose isn't to inflate the grades, but to echo the kind of feedback you'll get in the final game. The game won't give you a "D"-", it'll just say "You get a two-dot grade! Your box score is 13." It's up to the player to decide if 13 is good or not.

0.0510

Goodbye purple and cyan checkerboards! The overworld's now got some grassy/dirty textures closer what will be in the final game. It's still a placeholder but... less placeholdery? Maybe?

This version also improves the piece kicks and some details specific to 20G. For those of you messing with the expert level difficulties, they'll now be slightly more manageable.