Thanks for playing everyone! It’s been so fun to see everyone enjoying this game that I’ve been working on for so many months on my own. Some small updates:

v1.2

• Changed color of negative-1 (makes BlueGoo easier to read)
• Overhauled MakeLess scoring
• Fixed randomness (every run after the first one had a fixed seed)
• Added MakeMatch
• Added quickload (reload last played mode)
• Added: click on title screen to speed up animation
• Added “unlock all” instructions to the manual
• Changed stickers for Make42, MakeHex, others
• Clarified some plugins in the manual
• Added check_equal plugin

Storytime: randomness fix

This was a fun bug. The first game you played was properly random, but every game after that was the exact same sequence of boards, whoops. One player was trying to full-clear MakeLess (sorry) and noticed that the same boards kept showing up when resetting, so they messaged me – sharp eye, thank you!

How’d it happen? Well, every mode has a background that I generate by smushing together a bunch of math, demoscene-style. The backgrounds are consistent – for instance, everyone sees the same background for BlueGoo. I do this by hashing the mode’s blueprint and using the result to seed the global random number generator… but I forgot to reseed it to a random seed afterwards! So after background generation, every restart locked into the same sequence of “random” boards.

Funny how hard that was to spot, since it only showed up after the first reset. I’ve played the game tons while making it, and I know you’ve all been playing it a lot too, but only one person noticed! (and told me)

Thanks for reading, thanks for playing, and good luck trying to clear MakeLess (it seems wildly difficult)

-pancelor