Hi everyone! We are extremely pleased to provide this new major release version for Masters of Puzzle to you today. As we are moving closer to leaving Early Access, we are now focusing on improving all aspects of the game, fixing old issues, and redesigning some features to make them more user friendly and convenient. Check out what’s new:

• Gameplay: Puzzle tile sizes across different tilesets are now closer to each other and more consistent from tileset to a tileset. This feature will only work for new games while old saved games should remain unaffected
• Gameplay: The puzzle box is now placed in the center of the playing surface when starting a new game. You can move it away by using Alt + Left Mouse Button interaction
• Gameplay: The puzzle model is now consistent in size across all tilesets and puzzles (it would previously scale up and down based on tilesets and puzzle sizes)
• Gameplay: When called for inspection, the puzzle model will now take about half of the viewport to the right. This will allow the player to compare it much easier with the puzzle assembly while moving around and rotating the camera
• Gameplay: Reduced the puzzle assembly area by 25% (necessary for the bigger puzzle tilesets 2500+)
• Gameplay: Enabled the functionality to spawn up to 6 containers on the playing surface
• Framework: Created a new mechanism for puzzle tile mesh colliders usage. This improves game performance drastically and allows the game to be played with the largest tilesets (2500+)
• Visuals: Improved significantly the puzzle tiles mesh generation algorithm. They will look flatter and will no longer appear to have big sunken triangle wedges towards female links
• Visuals: Changed the rendering color space to Linear. This will improve visual quality significantly
• Visuals: Reduced overall puzzle tile thickness by 40%
• Interface: Added keyboard shortcuts for sending puzzle tiles to containers (keys from F2 to F7). This feature will work for individual held puzzle tiles, puzzle tile groups, and multiple puzzle tiles that are held together
• Interface: Added hours to the in-game timer widget
• Bugfix: Fixed false self-shadows on puzzle tiles that were visible as dark diagonal lines which prevented the image from being observed properly
• Bugfix: Fixed a bug where the mouse cursor would not lock during camera rotation with RMB causing sometimes unintended edge scrolling
• Bugfix: Fixed a bug with puzzle tile groups on game load that would sometimes make them link under an angle

There is much more to this update and you can find the full release notes on our website here.

Larger Puzzle Tilesets

As you’ve probably guessed by now reading this post, we’ve finally managed to find a solution for our huge performance issues when larger tilesets were being used (i.e. boxes of 2000 and more puzzle tiles). Yey!!! Keep in mind that these tilesets will still require relatively powerful PC to play with comfortably. However, where before that it was nearly impossible to play with 2500+ puzzle tiles, now we can get a very good framerate with an NVidia 2070 RTX card even with 4000 puzzle tiles. You will not yet have access to this feature until we manage to test it thoroughly. Also, tilesets above 2000 were always intended to be available only with second-tier paid puzzle boxes due to how much game time they would provide for a player.

With that being said, we will provide for free one entirely new puzzle box that can be sliced up to 4000 puzzle tiles as a huge thanks for our Early Access players. Stay tuned for an announcement very soon.

Roadmap Ahead

We mentioned last time that we are now working towards leaving Early Access and this release is part of that plan. In the following weeks, we will continue working on improvements and features that flesh out the game. You can expect one more or at most two big updates before we reach the point for official release on Steam. We will, of course, post the proper announcements when it’s time for that. For now, we wanted to share our vision of the future.

When we started working on this game, we envisioned a lot of features and cool stuff (many of these are not even announced yet). We didn’t take into account the significant amount of research and work these ideas will require in order to become a reality. We also did not plan to remain in Early Access beyond the year 2019. Because of this, we were forced to evaluate our roadmap and decide which features we want to focus on right now in order to deliver a good, stable, finished game to more players. The rest of the features we want to release within new major versions and maybe even game expansions. We are now done with that evaluation and we’ve decided to move the following major features for after we leave Early Access – Multiplayer and Customizable Playrooms. As our earliest fans know, we actually have a working prototype of the Multiplayer, however, to put that on Steam would require us to invest a substantial monthly sum on cloud services. Currently, this is not something we can afford to do as the interest in the game is not sufficient to make it sustainable. As for the Customizable Playrooms, we feel that this feature, while cool and interesting, does not add immediate value to the core of the game itself. Combined with the significant amount of work it would require, we’ve decided to postpone it for a major release at a later date.

We are sorry we had to change the initial scope of our plans and we hope this isn’t much of a disappointment to you. We still plan to deliver a lot of new features and cool puzzles for you. Our public roadmap is available at Taiga should you wish to follow up on our development as it moves forwards.

Thank you so much for being our fans and playing our game! We’ll see you soon in our next update. Stay safe and stay home!