Version 1.3.0-1.3.1

We finally have a release! Yay!

Major features include:

• A re-balanced Medium and Hard AI, for a less predictable and more interesting challenge
• A completely new game setup menu
• Many small internal optimizations
• Bug fixes to large board sizes
• A new game engine version! ... hence the spam of several releases working out the bugs... sowwy.
• A new pause menu! Currently only really accessible on desktop, and still kinda prototype-y and potentially prone to edge cases. Hit the Esc key in a game to try it out!
• Many internal adjustments to make future work easier

Which leaves two questions:

When will we get a higher difficulty level?

Uhhhh... to be honest, I intended to make another level above Hard... but Hard is already kinda stupidly hard. Additionally, I'm pushing the CPU as hard as I can to handle the existing Hard AI. I did think about moving Hard up to this higher level and putting a new level in between, but nothing quite felt satisfying to fill that gap.

I have an experiment in progress for yet another different type of AI engine, namely one based on Monte Carlo Tree Search. I think it'll have a decent chance of producing better and more accurate evaluations than Hard, but I'm not confident yet. Stay tuned for updates!

What happened to online multiplayer?

Ah yes, see, I actually have good news now: the server is done! Admittedly a simpler server than initially planned, and it'll need updates for the new version of the computer players, but it is ready for a client to connect!

The only thing holding up full online multiplayer is the amount of new UI work that it will inevitably require. For anyone who's worked with writing user interfaces in Bevy, you probably know how much time it takes to get a moderately-polished user interface. For anyone who hasn't, here's your friendly reminder that the entire game, including the monstrosity that is the custom game setup menu code, is all open source!

One thing I discovered near the end of this cycle is that, to my knowledge, Bevy does not have a built-in widget for editable text boxes. If anyone is aware of such a widget, please let me know! Otherwise, I'm going to probably spend an absolutely unnecessary amount of time writing and testing a custom widget for this purpose. This will be used to enter a game code, which can be shared between friends playing the game across the internet. It will also probably be used to type display names and so forth.

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Lastly, as you know, Hopdot is free. I develop it entirely in my spare time, which has thinned out lately in large part due to college... which is why this release has taken so long. Unfortunately, this is also time I'm spending doing this instead of working at a job, and that is becoming less and less sustainable for me. I really don't like begging for money, and so I won't; it's not like I'm in financial trouble right now or in danger of such, but I realized I never said something to the effect of "hey please support this game," so...

If you have a couple extra dollars to throw in the general direction of developing Hopdot, I would be immensely grateful! Who knows, you might even get access to features early in the future... (no there's no special rewards yet; I barely managed to get this release out, whaddya want from me /lh)

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Anyway, that's all for this devlog. Have an amazing day, and I'll see you in the next update! (or in our Discord server?)