Push To Finish

I’ve been running around in circles since the last game news in December. I’ve struggled over the creative direction for REVO and how best to push it across the finish line. The conclusion is that it’ll be better to focus on completeness of the existing design rather than try to redesign it toward a better vision. Maybe I’ll dig into this topic more later for those interested in the difficult game design process.

Shiny New Engine

You might recall that I made a small engine upgrade to REVO at the end of the year and that this turned out very well. It fixed a long standing graphical bug. Since then, I’ve done it again, but this time it was a much bigger upgrade to the fundamental game engine. At first, this change will mostly help the development process, but it has the potential to eventually improve player experience directly, which was the main motivation.

Improvements

Dozens of bugs and gameplay adjustments have been made. Some of these were prioritized after people who tested the game hit overly difficult spots, things that were too easy, and found some elements of the game unclear. Games need to be easy to learn and function properly, so this is where I put a lot of my attention. For a detailed list of changes and some explanation, take a look at the REVO Change Log.

Performance

After these adjustments, I was initially very concerned over a major drop in performance. So I crawled through the game’s behavior statistics and found several ways to smooth it out through more efficient code. Now the game generally runs very nicely and seems ready for this new test build release.

Play REVO

If you’re already a VIP subscriber, then you have a link to the REVO download page in your inbox as we speak. Otherwise, you can join up at any time: