Captain's Mess

I was recently encouraged to give my open-source networking library CaptainsMess some more love. It's still missing Bluetooth and Internet support so I've been transferring those features from Spaceteam, generalizing the code, and making it more user-friendly so the 3rd-party libraries that I use can be added/removed/replaced.

In fact, while doing this I discovered that my current Android Bluetooth plugin is no longer being supported by its developer :( so I'm looking for a new one to integrate before I release the changes. Since the existing plugin costs money I can't recommend that people pay for it if it might stop working in the near future. It does still work for now, but it's only a matter of time before it will need an update...

Blabyrinth Progress

After a bunch of complicated technical work on the LevelGraph re-architecture, it's now up the same state the game was in before (exciting, I know...). So it generates the same kind of levels but they are easier to test/debug and extend.

I'm still not 100% happy with it but it's much better than it was and I'll only need to make small changes from here on instead of big ones.

One thing I can do now is create an editor to choose which components the level generator picks from. I did this before in code, but this way is sooo much faster and easier. I can turn everything off except for a few settings to get a really simple level with only certain features (for testing). For example:

• only keypad locks using numbers
• only clues split up onto multiple items (eg. scraps of paper) hidden in plain sight
• nothing else

Or I can turn everything on for a complete level.

But I'm also planning to use this system to change the difficulty of levels by excluding or including harder puzzle types and obscure features. The final game will start easy (to introduce new players) and then there's a secret way to access harder puzzles that needs to be discovered within the game :)

Music & SFX

I'm starting to work with Phil (Philippe Lachance, the musician for Spaceteam) to add music and sound. It's a tricky game to write music for because there might be four devices all playing audio at once, at different volumes and with a slight delay (due to network latency). Also people need to hear each other talking, so the in-game music will mostly be atmospheric/ambient.

Next time hopefully we'll have some music samples for you but for now here are some random sound effects.

Secret Passage opening

Portcullis

Collapse!

~ Henry