Scale Mail v1.1 Update (Changelog)

Hello! Thank you to everyone who played and provided feedback on Scale Mail so far. I've decided to push a little post-jam update, addressing as much of the feedback as I could. This will most likely be the only update on the game for now until the indefinite future (unless there are any game-breaking issues that need to be fixed), but I've made sure to add a few goodies here. I hope you all enjoy.

List of Sections

• New Items & Score Counter
• Quality of Life Improvements
• Exploit & Bug Fixes
• Offline & Jam Versions
• v1.1.1 Patch
• What's Next?

New Items & Score Counter

There are now two new types of items! First item is the moon-shaped amethyst which appears after earning 14 points. Only up to one amethyst will appear at a time until 30 points have been reached. Afterwards, there will then be a maximum of two amethysts on-screen at the same time.

The second type of item are circular coins. They serve as optional challenge items that appear every so often with their own separate score counter. The weight of each coin that appears is identical to the weight of an existing solution item that appears on-screen, meaning that they can either replace that item or be skipped entirely if they are too difficult to balance.

Quality of Life Improvements

• Items can now be flung around instead of abruptly dropping when the mouse button is released.
• A new countdown timer will display once the scale has stabilized at the target weight to show how much longer it must remain stable before the solution can be accepted.
• The collision box on the base of the scale is now a circle that more accurately represents the scale's shape.
• Added (optional) weight indicators for individual items.
  • These will show up as pie slices on the scale display that represent the weight of each item resting on the platform.
  • Since this feature is a little unstable in its current form and promotes a slightly different style of gameplay, it is disabled by default. It can be enabled by double-clicking the circle at the center of the scale's needle (#1 on the figure at the bottom of this post).
• Decreased the size of rotation increments when rotating items with the scroll-wheel to allow for finer-grained adjustments.
• On web and Linux, the mouse cursor will now change when hovering over and dragging items.
  • Apparently Windows doesn't natively have a drag icon, so the mouse cursor will not change on those builds unfortunately.

Exploit & Bug Fixes

• The scale platform should no longer break or get stuck when trying to push it too far in either direction.
• The platform's collision is also one-way now, to prevent items propping it up from underneath.
• A proper solution checker has been implemented to account for hacky and alternate solutions.
  • For the most part, it will reject any invalid solutions where items on the scale are touching the wall, countertop, etc. Offending items will flash if they are detected after the platform has stabilized.
    • It was kinda fun to watch players cheat the game though, so I've included a hidden toggle to disable checks for invalid items in case anyone wants it like that. You can switch this toggle by double-clicking the little square stamp on the box icon at the top-left corner of the screen (#2 on the figure at the bottom of this post). An audio cue will play to indicate that it has been enabled/disabled.
  • Before, there was usually a "definite" combination of items for each solution, but sometimes the weight randomization would result in an alternate combination of items to be possible. Originally in these cases, the game would clear only the intended solution items and leave a few items behind on the scale. The game should now accept these alternate solutions and clear the appropriate items as expected.
• A few unseen fixes that probably didn't have an effect on the web version of the game (I don't know, maybe it spat something out in the console or something). They caused some errors and crashes while I tested development builds, so they're fixed now.

Offline & Jam Versions

I've uploaded offline Linux and Windows executables for both this update and the original version that was submitted to the Ludum Dare Game Jam. These might come in handy for those internet outage days, or for those who prefer playing the original version of the game without the new changes described here.

v1.1.1 Patch

I had a few friends play v1.1.0 as I was writing this changelog and realized I should squeeze in a couple more adjustments:

• Slightly increased the detection margin for reaching the target weight to provide a little more reasonable leeway on solutions.
• Modified various base weights for items to better reflect the size of each one. The weights are still random for every item that is spawned, but now bigger items should generally weigh more as one would expect.

What's Next?

As I stated at the beginning, this will be the only update for a long while. Work on the update dragged on for a little longer than I would have liked, so I'm rather burnt out on working further on Scale Mail currently. I would very much like to move on to working on other projects now, but I'm very glad I was able to get this update out (this is the first time I've even accomplished something like this). If I ever do feel motivated to work on this game again, I already have a backlog of things to add and change. Again though, there are no plans to do anything else with this project anytime soon. However, I do hope you all enjoy what I've delivered thus far! Thank you for playing.

Figure 1

Don't mind this section. You'll know what this is for if you read the changelog thoroughly.