One More Alpha

Wow I had a lot of commits since the last post. I usually go through my commit log + maybe the daily posts I make to the facebook group to remind myself what I worked on the past week. Apparently I had about 40 commits. What did I do though.

Half of what I did has to do with appearances. I have put a bit more love into my time formatting (formatting time is a lot trickier than you would think; especially if you want it to be localisable). I also pieced together various stuff for stores and such, including the new icon. The colour theme has changed, although that is based on the palette I use for the game which is way more subdued than I normally use.  Oh ya, and transitions. Almost all of them are done now. The only spot missing is most of the animations when you enter/leave the dishpit.

I did a fair bit of bug fixing along the way. A lot of it was smaller stuff. One, though, will hopefully resolve an ongoing issue. I have tried to keep everything as responsive as possible. This unfortunately has the side effect that the threading model is a bit... curious. That has resulted in a very rare crash that appears nonsensical. Despite repeated attempts to non-instrusively fix it, I ended up hitting a related crash (in a new spot) this week while testing very intensely. So put in a more intrusive fix which complicates the model, but should resolve all the relevant problems. With more intense testing I don't SEEM to have missed any new issues from the fix (there were a few deadlocks at first, but easily fixed). 

Like I mentioned, lost of testing. This was actually done originally to try and understand the difficulty issues and come up with a solution (or decide once and for all that it is fine). I ended up with a lot more bugs after that, some have been fixed others will be fixed soon. I also finally had enough data to do some proper balancing so I was able to make a ton of more stuff consistent. As for the difficulty? It is rough, but I'll leave it be. I have made a few changes though. Coins are earned differently (noticed that once you get high enough you rarely earned which seems backwards). There is also a new item to relieve some of the tension as the dishes keep coming.

 That said, there is another alpha build. With the balancing I am basically ready for beta though. I need to add a tiny bit of content (and run through this alpha for major issues). Other than that, everything else if bug fixes, visual improvements, and everything that fits in the 'marketing and press' bag (screenshots, videos, pages, etc.).