Time for a quick update on what I’ve been up to over the past couple of weeks.
The first thing to mention, in case you missed “tutorial week” last
week, I released a series of tutorial videos for GearBlocks beginners,
so do check those out if you haven’t already. Click here for the playlist.
Help screen
I’ve been working on improving the help screen in game. There’s now a section that lists all of those tutorial videos, and clicking on a link will open up the Steam overlay and play the video.
I also added a quick reference guide to the main screen UI:
The last section has a list of controls for the tools, but I’m planning on improving this by changing it to be more of a step-by-step “how to build” guide.
Auto save
Currently there’s no undo functionality in the game, and it’ll be a while until I can get to this, so in the meantime I’ve implemented an auto save feature. At least this way there’s less chance of people losing all their progress from an accidental deletion for example. In the gameplay options menu the time interval between saves can be configured, or auto save turned off altogether.
Right now there’s only one auto save “slot”, but I’d like to add multiple save slots (e.g. two or three) that it cycles through.
Quick save / load
I’ve also implemented quick save and load. Pressing F5 saves the world (again, there’s currently only one save slot). Holding F9 for half a second will load the last saved world (whether it be from an auto, quick, or regular save).
Hopefully all of these improvements will make life easier for both new and experienced players!