Kinda turning Fallish here.

Been a busy week of containing to polish the systems we have in place & clean out the remaining bugs.

Part of that is doing jobs you hate.

I am very much so a systems designer, I create an interesting rule set & see what happens when you push it in various ways. However on Tuesday I needed to buck up & tackle zooming.

Pathogen is coming to iPhone4/5/beyond, but it is pretty hard to play on such a small screen. To compensate we knew that we wanted a pinch/zoom feature that would allow the player to zoom into the play space. Saying we want that functionality & making it a reality are often two very different things.

Spent ALL day Tuesday getting absolutely nowhere. There is alot of strange math involved with attempting to zoom to a point in space, the object needs to reorient its pivot point, the object itself needs to offset to keep the screen centered, & after your zooming in, the player still needs to be able to pan around the environment.

Starling doesn't have any of this built in. Originally I attempted to use the Feathers Scroll Container object to facilitate panning, however it became apparent that there was no clean way of getting the thing to zoom.

The answer was to build something entirely custom. Its still not perfect (you don't zoom in exactly to where you want to go) but its good enough for a first test.

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Pathogen received two minor gameplay balances for the first time in almost 4 months.

1. After some great testing feedback the Virus recharge has been increased from 8 to 10 turns.
2. Putting a level three onto the field produces 4 adjacent level 2 pieces, these level 2 pieces actually never spread again. I don't know why it took me this long to correct this minor issue. Now the cascading feature functions a bit more logically. 3's always create 2's which always create 1's.

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Took a critical eye to our replay system. Yes its super cool, especially since the players can interact with the timeline at will. However by creating a timeline we were creating some expectations that we couldn't hold up too.

In general, whenever a player sees a timeline bar they expect to be able to smoothly scrub through time without a problem. Our timeline could never do that, perhaps with more time/experience we could create a system that would react that dynamically. The reality was that if they tried to interact with the timeline it would stall, hang, before jumping to a moment in time. Overall it felt amateur & unfinished.

So we fix this by removing the timeline, keeping the play button, centering it on screen & flanking it on either side with step forward/backward buttons that increment the current state of the game by 1. It keeps the functionality, is supported by our clean UI aesthetic, & helps to manage expectations.

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Online it progressing well, should have a first playable next week. Matt will be tackling the Online UI so hopefully we should be up & running @ testing on Monday.

Fixed the majority of UI aspect ratio problems that plagued the iPhone4/5 builds & retina display. Some still exists (victory screen, I'm looking at you), but its getting better.

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Whew, I guess a lot has happened.