Greetings!

Before I even begin I want to say sorry to all Brainroll supporters for having to wait this long before the next update. My true intention was to have the game be released and finished by now but other things were more interesting at the time and in hindsight, my ability to design games was not that great hence I always felt like something was missing from the game.

With that said, I am here with a new update for Brainroll. This update is quite special to me because if you look past all the patch notes, I am in a completely different mental state as a game designer. This shines through if you play this version of the game.

Design Direction

Before moving on let's talk a bit about what led me to the changes that was made. The old game had some design flaws, for example, the levels were all designed to be different variations of a maze. While this can lead to fun levels it will get very boring after some time, there is no puzzle aspect for this and after talking to players who tried the game the result was often that they just tried different moves untill something worked. This is not how I see a puzzle. Instead of this approach I wanted to do something more interesting, I wanted to first of all make the game contain actual puzzles that has solutions, together with this I also wanted the player to have enough freedom so that there is actually different approaches to try against the puzzles, you as a player are in control and can change the game and environment around you while still maintaining the idea that the puzzle only has one correct solution and communicates an idea of the game to the player.

The result of this is that I have now cut almost ALL old levels from the game and replaced them with levels that perhaps are not 100% tuned to exactly how I want them but atleast showcases how I will make the game moving forward.

I plan on making a more thorough post where I outline my understanding and process for puzzle game design.

Version 0.5.0

So with this version we have basically scratched the idea of the old sprint notes at the end of the last post and went completely rogue. Out of all the points that I mentioned in the last posts we have not worked on a single one of them and instead prioritized making a good game.

With that said here is the full changelog for this version:

Added

• Keyboard navigation is now supported within the menus.
• Debug system is now available to developers.
• Input buffering for smoother movement.
• Undo system with a new bindeable undo button to undo your last move.
• Reset button as a bindeable button.
• Pressure plates & doors.
• Passable block.
• Crash reporter that asks if user wants to send anonymous crash dump on fatal errors.

Updated

• Maraton version updated to 1.4.0.
• Internal optimizations to rendering.
• Pixel-art anti aliasing.

Removed

• In-game Editor.
• Level select menu.
• Screen shake effect.
• Fast forward keybinds.

Moving forward

From here on forwards I will not mention exactly what I am going to do (mostly because I am not sure myself). I will however focus on getting the core game finished. This means moving on I want to have all the mechanics in place so that I can start getting some real art for the game.

Before ending this post I want to thank everyone who has supported me and this game, it truuly means the world to me. Thank you so much.

If you have any feedback I am very interested in hearing it, you can get back to me through any of my socials. Hope you enjoy this version of the game!

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