This new release 2018.0.6920 focuses mostly on game improvements, performance optimizations, and several new minor features to make your game experience more enjoyable. It will come live on Steam in the next few hours once we verify and are satisfied with the stability of the new build. Take a look at the major changes:

• Gameplay: Implemented Skip step button and behavior for the tutorial. Players can now skip various tutorial steps to proceed onwards if necessary
• Interface: Start New Game GUI will now show whether a puzzle box was completed at least once in any tileset configuration
• Interface: Start New Game GUI will now show the earned achievements for each puzzle box. Currently, it will only display the highest tileset completion achievement, but it’s ready to show limited and other achievements as well
• Framework: Puzzle images will get sliced to tiles only after a game has been started or loaded. This will decrease the starting time of the game client
• Framework: Redesigned the audio manager playlist loading and playback. This will optimize tremendously the in-game loading times
• Bugfix: Fixed a problem with the puzzle box preview image in Start New Game GUI where in some cases the image would overflow outside the game window

You can find the full release notes on our website here.

What’s Next

This will most probably be the last release update for this year unless we have to deploy a hotfix or two, but even in that case, there will be no more new features for the year 2018. This doesn’t mean we are not working on new and exciting things for Masters of Puzzle, though. These are the things currently in the works in the order of their priority:

• Greater variation in puzzle tile shapes – we are redesigning the puzzle image slicing and generation algorithms to allow for much greater variety in the shapes of the puzzle tiles. The end goal here is to be able to emulate the best real-life puzzles and to also increase the set of puzzle slicing settings, some of which we plan to expose to you when starting a new game
• Integration with Discord – while we’ve already deployed a basic integration with this release, we want to be able to utilize the full capabilities of Discord like custom status updates, spectate feature, and party features (once the multiplayer is ready) so you can have more fun with your friends
• Player & Environment controls overhaul – based on player feedback and our own observations, we’ve planned a major overhaul of the player controls. The aim here is to make the gameplay more natural and to allow for greater selection of tools at your disposal. This is also a prerequisite for the controls mapping feature you’ve been asking for

Of course, there will be a lot more small features and improvements coming and in-between, but these 3 are the major ones you can expect in the first release(s) in 2019.

That’s all for today. We wish you a happy Christmas and a great New Year! And don’t forget about our special Christmas event, which will be running until the 4th of January. Go and get these limited achievements before it’s too late