HELLO LOYAL BLUELINERS! :D
First off, thank you so much for being part of Early Access. The quality of the final game was only possible with all of the great feedback from the community. The game is much better now than it was when we started Early Access, thanks to you!
In the
previous update, we had made some big conceptual changes to the AI to let it "think with both dice" but there were still some weaknesses. John Yianni (the designer of the Tatsu board game) was a huge help and recorded videos of him playing several games against the AI and analyzing its weaknesses.
Since people often like to peek behind-the-scenes, here are three videos which we streamed which use the analysis by John Yianni to make (and verify) a bunch of really solid improvements to the AI:
While we did a lot of work specifically on the AI, we also did a variety of unrelated tasks to get the final layer of polish on, for launch! :D
- Even more AI improvements as mentioned above! Now it isn't so "chicken". It will mess yo day up! ;)
- Bugfix: under some circumstances, the game would render a "ghost tile" (the semitransparent stone to help you see where you're moving) in an obviously-wrong spot.
- Music on the main menu wasn't audible.
- Created official steam avatars! If you go to your profile and click "Edit Profile" then "Choose from official game avatars" to see what's available!!
- Made the fake pieces on the corner-spaces easier to differentiate from real pieces. Thanks user ZugzwangNC!
- Accessibility: Signup dialog didn't work with gamePad to the point that it actually blocked gamePad-only players from getting to Online Games. GamePad support in BigPicture appears to be full now.
- Made sure the pieces in the DeadZone don't overlap more than a certain amount so that you can always see what's in the DeadZone.
- Added explanation message when player clicks on a piece that has no moves because the destination spots are blocked.
- Fixed a case where exiting the game while a piece was moving move would cause a crash.
- Reduced logspam when using gamePad.
- Bugfix: after choosing to start a game as the host, the opponent's lobby slot started rendering weird. Now that's fixed.
- Fixed a variety of whose-turn-is-it bugs in multiplayer. Thanks to all of the users, especially Mosse and the_bentley_maniac for reporting these issues and helping us debug them!!
- If there is a error on the game server AFTER storing a move on the game server, added code to make sure that the same ply was not re-played on the server.
That's it for this release… as always, we'll keep supporting and improving this game for a loooooooong time, so let us know in the forums if you see any spots for improvement!! :D
http://store.steampowered.com/app/445070/If you want to spread the word about the game, please check out this quick page for 2 or 3 easy ways you can help support us so we can keep doing what we do & bringing more fantastic board games to Steam!
http://bluelinegamestudios.com/share/tatsu