This month marks an exciting occasion, the 1.0 release of Striker Ball! This will be the first official out of Beta release of the game. What that means is that we have reached the first version of the game that meets all of our basic requirements to call the game done. While the future will likely hold bug fixes, behind the scenes improvements, and farther along, possible big updates, Striker Ball now represents a small but complete example of a game made using the Bones game engine.

With Striker Ball coming out of Beta we are now expecting to move forward with a new game project very soon. While we are not ready to share anything on a new game just yet, we want to make an official announcement regarding the next project by the end of February. So let's take a look at the latest updates that will be bringing us to the first out of Beta release of Striker Ball.

New Features

We got to add a couple new features to the game this month in the form of a settings menu, as well as a credits screen. While these might not be the most exciting features they are the kind of thing that every complete game needs so we wanted to make sure they were included in Striker Ball for the 1.0 release. A couple new buttons on the main menu allow you to navigate to these new screens.

Improvements

Small improvements were made throughout the game's menus to make them nicer to use. We added some back buttons to make navigation more intuitive as well as fixes to mouse control in menus. The LAN option verbiage was simplified to make it easier to understand.

In addition to the visible improvements that were made, Latency also spent a lot of effort improving things in the background. This included tons of maintenance tasks and several bug fixes that amounted to a total of 69 code commits.

Leaving Beta: What we didn't do.

Although Striker Ball has officially left Beta there are a few things that we would have liked to do that we decided to leave out for the time being. First is improvements to the CPU player behavior. We decided to leave it as is because it is functional and putting more time into it was having increasingly small returns on investment. We would have liked them to behave more organically, closer to a human player, but it is already very playable, so for now we are satisfied with the current system.

The bigger thing we have decided to leave out is a more advanced LAN play system. Currently you can only play up to two players per computer, and only two computers connected to each other. We had originally intended to allow any number of players playing on any number of computers (up to four players total of course), but this ended up being a complicated system to design and will likely require some effort from Zicklag, the designer of Bones, to help get the system working well. Rather than bang our heads against a wall trying to get it working, we have decided to wait for a good opportunity to implement this in the future. This frees us up to work on something that we can make rapid progress on right now, namely an entirely new game that builds on the foundation we have laid while making Striker Ball.

Conclusion

Striker Ball is a very small game example, however it's simplicity has lent to our ability to develop a complete game without unnecessary complications. This has allowed us to focus on the important fundamentals that will be needed for all future games created in Bones. We are excited to reach the point of a 1.0 release and to have a new project on the horizon.

We hope you have enjoyed following the journey so far. Stay tuned for more next month.

Written by, Harsulin: Lead Artist at K-tech Studio