It's been a massive week of updates for TurtleRun and there's lots to talk about.

Firstly, TurtleRun had its first ever paid download! Who cares if it was from my girlfriend? But we're not here for that. Along with a bunch of small bug fixes, quality improvements and features, there are two brand-new levels to enjoy, let's get into it.

Card Game

I had the idea to create a card game based on an old drinking game we used to play back in the day called "Off The Bus". 5 cards are laid face-down in-front of the player and starting from left to right, you have to guess "Red or Black", followed by "Higher or Lower", revealing the next card in the row after the guess is made. Incorrect guesses restart the game back to 5 cards. The player must get 5 correct in row to get "off the bus", and buy themselves a few more hours of consciousness at the party.

I had no idea how I was going to implement this at first, never mind what the actual reward/point of playing would be. I decided to tie the card game into a boss fight, giving the player the opportunity to get a damage bonus modifier based on how well they performed in the game. Unlimited re-tries are available but the player can choose to continue with whatever bonus (or lack of) that they have achieved.

This was a rewarding challenge to implement and I was really proud to come up with something so original and have it be fun and worthwhile. 

Can you get "off the bus"?

Boss Encounter

Next came the very first boss encounter, where I was hours into spaghetti coding before accepting it was time to implement a Finite State Machine. This was surprisingly easy and really helped to clean up the code. I'm looking forward to going back through the code at some point and implementing many more of these for other objects.

This boss is a nice balance of challenging at first, but fairly easy once you get the hang of the movements for each phase. To be honest, it might be ridiculously easy, I've played it so much that I can no longer tell, that's where your feedback will come in super handy!

This also gave me the opportunity to hop into Aseprite and continue developing my Pixel Art...skills? As I wanted to create plenty of interesting appearances and animations for the boss.

Level 3

But before you get anywhere near these cool new features, you'll get to make your way through another brand new level 3, where I introduced Bouncy Mushrooms. They were simple to implement but add a lot of variety to level design and eventually will become a really cool component for mixing player mechanics in later levels, they also might make an appearance in the boss encounter…

Full Screen Support

Technically this existed before but text was displayed horribly when switching to Full Screen. This is an issue I've gone back to 4 or 5 times and ended up just leaving so I can progress elsewhere in the game. Now was the time to get this sorted once and for all, which it has been. Ctrl + F will now toggle Full Screen mode. Extremely happy to check this off the list as it's been nagging me since the proto-type!

New Music

Thanks to the incredibly talented and generous HeatleyBros, there are now even more songs throughout the game, I'm especially fond of the card game and boss encounter songs, but that could definitely be recency bias! Make sure you give them a check if you're ever needing music for your game, stream, or videos.

Overall

All in all I'm super excited with this update and I'm hoping a few people play and enjoy what I've created so far. Being my first ever venture into game development, I couldn't be happier with how things are going and I can't wait to see how it turns out down the line. As always, your feedback is super valuable to me. I'm sitting at my PC day in day out creating this game in a vacuum and essentially only playing it by myself. I'd love to hear how someone with no experience feels about it, where things are too difficult or frustrating, things that could be done better, all the usual good stuff, please let me know! 

Thanks as always for checking out TurtleRun and I look forward to hearing about your play experiences and how I can improve the game.

Changelist

New Content

• New levels added
• Added bouncing mushrooms that can be used to reach higher places
• Added background clouds
• Card game added to play for bonus damage
• First Boss fight added
• Added Music option to menu which links to the HeatleyBros youtube channel
• Added full screen support

Changed Content

• Dialog fonts change to be more in line with the retro feel of the game

Bug Fixes

• Text is no longer displaying blurry in full screen
• Modified collision box of spikes to make them more forgiving and in line with the sprite
• Fixed an issue where sign post text required manual line breaks above a certain line length
• Fixed an issue where loading the game after level 1 would cause an endgame error due to miscounting the completed levels

Many thanks,

-Cappiche