Milestone v0.24

What changed this week?

Added a lives indicator, and a few minor bugfixes!

The lives indicator appears below your character on the right. Each time you top out, a pan will be crossed out. On levels like the 3k rank challenge which clear the entire playfield, the life indicators are gold.

A few minor bugfixes as well! Collars (fuzzy decorations around the necks) were invisible in the previous release. Fat creatures had very small hitboxes. Resizing the window to be very very short could cause rendering problems. Thanks for the bug reports!

What changed in Milestone v0.24?

• Massive performance improvements -- The game should run faster and take less memory. If the game was a little sluggish for you before, try it again!
• New visual indicators in puzzles -- Pans for remaining lives, and explosions when the game speeds up.
• Numerous bugfixes -- Sorry! Thanks for catching these!

0.2328

Performance improvements, scene transitions, web audio fixes, and a new speed up indicator!

This week's performance improvements were targeted towards web and mobile platforms which had trouble rendering creatures. There is a new setting for Creature detail, and toggling it from High to Low simplifies the creature rendering resulting in a 50% FPS increase on some platforms! I also made a few other minor performance tweaks, so things should be running smoother at High detail too.

Added some scene transitions! Nothing big, but the video fades out and back in instead of awkwardly freezing when you navigate certain menus. It should make the game feel more cozy. I know fading out and in isn't the most exciting thing in the world, so I might come back and make this more exciting some day.

Fixed some choppy music in the web version! The itch.io version of Turbo Fat has some noticably choppy music when you click around the menus or navigate the overworld. Now, the music fades out and back in during scene changes so this choppiness should go away.

Speed ups now include a little explosive poof! Hish from the Turbo Fat discord pointed out that the sound of the speed ups is important, but there is no visual cue. There is now -- enjoy your poofs!

I also fixed a few bugs related to imported creatures appearing fat in the creature editor, a bug which caused the super-secret tutorial easter egg to crash the game, and a bug which caused the ghost piece to behave strangely if you turned it on and off while playing a level.

Thanks for everyone who's catching bugs and suggesting ideas! I'll try to work in everything I can!

0.2321

More rendering performance improvements! Compared to the previous release, the overworld FPS increased from 350 fps to 650 fps on my PC, and it runs much smoother on my phone as well.

More specifically, the overworld goop rendering is more efficient. It used to be a 3-step process which rendered the goop, and then the brown sponge texture, and manually tried to shift things where they should be. Now it's a 1-step process which uses a vertex shader so everything just magically ends up in the right place. It should use less memory and be way faster. The goop algorithm also uses prerendered OpenSimplexNoise, instead of perlin noise which was way slower. These changes make the goop look a little different, but more importantly they're very fast and efficient.

Additionally, the creature rendering is slightly more efficient. Lines are rendered without anti-aliasing and with 3D disabled which makes things about 30% faster. The anti-aliasing was really subtle since the creatures are always shrunken down anyway, so you shouldn't notice it!

0.2314

Big performance improvements for how creatures work!

This release reduces the video ram usage by up to 75%, especially in scenes with lots of creatures. The improvement will vary from PC to PC but on my computer a stress test with 45 creatures improved from a slow 25 FPS to a speedy 203 FPS.

Will I ever need this many monsters on screen at once? Hmm, I'm not sure! But it sure would be fun.

This release also translates a big chunk of the game into Spanish, courtesy of Hish from the Turbo Fat Discord server! Thanks Hish! It's a little premature to fully translate the game into other languages, because so much is unfinished or likely to change. However, this preliminary translation helped me find several parts of the game which were still not being run through the translation engine such as settings, tab containers and key bindings! ...Catching these things early should make things go much smoother when the time comes to do a full translation.

You can change the language through the new Miscellaneous tab in the settings menu.

Milestone v0.23

What changed this week?

This release adds support for other languages!

The game supports translations with .po message files. Google has services for translating these kinds of files, and alternatively community members can provide their own translations or I can pay a professional localization team. The important thing is they won't have to go digging through all my source code!

What changed in Milestone v0.23?

• New cutscenes -- A few puzzles have cutscenes which play before and after them!
• New dialog effects -- Creatures open and close their mouths when they talk, and barf japanese into the air!
• New emotions -- Creatures can nod, shake their head, act embarrassed and fall in love!

0.2221

New moods, cutscenes and a few notable bug fixes!

Creatures can now emote in some new ways including nodding, shaking their head, looking awkward, falling in love or other things like that. This gives me a few more tools for creating the cutscenes in the game.

I've added three new cutscenes in different locations, so if you try the "Hello Skins", "Hello Bones" or "Hello Shirts" levels you'll see little cutscenes with some dialog. Sometimes these happen before the level, or sometimes after.

Thanks for your feedback and bug reports! I've fixed a crash when talking to the overworld crystal. I've also changed the Survival descriptions to indicate when the level ends -- instead of an arbitrary milestone in the middle of the level. Thanks for catching this stuff, you guys are the best!

0.2213

Some critical bug fixes, a few cutscene enhancements and a new puzzle timer!

The previous release 0.2207 broke pretty much every puzzle in the game -- everything except the newest cutscene I was working on! Sorry! It should all be fixed now. Thanks for reporting these kinds of problems!

The 'Hello everyone!' level demonstrates a few new scenario features:

• Cutscenes can play before or after a level, or both
• Levels can feature a chef other than the player
• The character 'Rhonk' has a special metabolism. They gain weight slower and lose weight faster

There's now a puzzle timer which counts the seconds as you play a level. This should especially help in rank mode when you're aiming for a specific time.

0.2207

While cutscenes aren't finished yet, this takes some steps to get there! Choosing the "Hello everyone!" level from the cell phone menu will launch the beginnings of a cutscene.

There were a lot of ways the code got rearranged to facilitate cutscenes, allowing levels to have level-specific dialog, creatures to show up at spawn points for a cutscene, changes to camera movement and similar changes necessary for cinematics.

Monsters now barf japanese at each other and *move their mouths when they talk. This makes the cutscenes easier to follow, but it also affects when you talk to monsters on the overworld.

More to come soon! There's a lot to go into these cutscenes and I want to get it right. Sorry it's taking so long!

Milestone v0.21

What changed this week?

There's a restaurant on the overworld which you can go inside! This will eventually get fleshed out and house some characters and cutscenes.

What changed in Milestone v0.21?

• Customizable controls -- Change your controls in the settings menu if you prefer WASD, arrow keys, or something else entirely.
• Goopy dessert-themed overworld -- The overworld has delicious goopy frosting and chocolatey foliage.
• New music -- Five new songs to wrap up the soundtrack!
• Improved dialog system -- Different speech bubbles replace the clumsy (Play Level 1) menu from the previous version.
• New cakes -- Making cakes with different piece combinations result in eight different foods, such as pies and gelatin!

0.1227

This release adds new cake box textures and food items! Arranging pieces into 3x4 and 3x5s will create different cakes boxes with different appearances, and clearing them results in 8 different cakes, pies and snacks.

I've still been working on adding the first buildings for the overworld, but it's a lot of work! Hopefully I'll have something for that next week. Thanks for your patience!