I figured I'd go ahead and just post updates more regularly than just once a week, because my schedule is a bit weird. I'm out of school, and I don't have a job or anything to keep individual days occupied, meaning I have a lot of time to spend programming stuff. However, I am going to be spending an entire month out of town unable to work on Regions. This combination of few days with a lot of time per day means I'm going to be updating very quickly in short bursts.

Anyways, let's talk about what exactly Regions is. Regions is (going to be) a minimalist puzzle game for PC and Android, where you must draw a path that covers every region in a particular level. Each region also has set rules on how many of its squares you can cover with your path. Let's look at an example level.

The first level of the game

In this particular level, every region is red. Red indicates that you can only cover one square in that region. Thusly, this is one of the six solutions:

Regions change color as you use them

Easy enough, right? Here's a harder level:

Blue regions must have two squares covered instead of one

Now that you've (hopefully) got a better understanding of the game, this is what I got done today:

-Regions look a little bit nicer than before! It's much easier to tell squares apart from each other, as they now have grey bands running across them.

-I tweaked the path drawing code a little bit, and it's much harder to mess up when drawing a path.

-I added yellow regions, which can have any number of squares covered on them. However, you can't cover two consecutive squares on the same yellow region.

-Levels can now have mandatory start/end positions for paths. A level can also only have one of them, so the player can decide where to end a path.

That should about flesh it out for all of the game mechanics. In the upcoming days, I get to cover the really fun tasks of transitioning between levels, as well as the interface design. I still haven't decided how I want to make the level transitions look, so I have to make a decision soon.

To wrap this blog up, here's what I've been listening to lately.