Over the Christmas break, I wrote the first implementation of the store and registration system. The game can now be purchased for 60% off. This discount will decrease as time goes on and the game is polished.

As I previously wrote, I want licenses to only provide value for paying customers. In its current incarnation, it provides them a dedicated host with automatic updates to the game. This will provide guaranteed stability both in the single player and over LAN. To support this updating infrastructure, the licenses are used to track how many times the game has been downloaded. In this way, I will be able to tell when more hardware is needed to support the updating system.

As for the game itself, the major changes this week are some experiments with the core gameplay. Players can no longer descend until the floor has been cleared of monsters. There is also a new visual component, Darkness. Players can only see what is in their immediate vicinity. I have been watching the play tests and will continue to tweak its behavior.

Toggling full screen can be done at anytime. Simply press the F key.

Some performance improvements were made to the core of sps-gamelib. Specifically, entities and actors are now cached in dictionaries. Slow entity searches was bogging down the new Darkness system, so optimizations were needed.

Want to chat? Throw a comment on this Reddit post or shoot me a tweet @XBigTK13X.