It's been 22 days since the end of GMTK 2022 (but who's counting?) and we finally finished an update. Technically this is only about 2 weeks in the making as we took some time off immediately after the jam. Let's talk about what's changed.

I. A Moment of Clarity

One of the major problems with this game (and most of Rogapol Interactive's games) is clarity. We try our best to explore abstract mechanics however we never do a good job of explaining them. This was my biggest failure in the original version of Cactus WimpOut. Now we show a lot more visual indicators of what is going on.

• Buttons squishing

Thanks to our new custom kerning technology (tm) we're able to have the letters on each button slide over when you mouse over them making room for the Rogapol emblem to appear in the corners. This makes it more clear what button you're about to press and makes it way more fun to press them.

• Cube particles

Now a stream of particles will show your dice disintegrating into points and joining your current score. This makes it much more obvious that the dice from previous rolls are completely out of play, but the score they gave you lives on. There's also a cool animation where the number text grows bigger for a second when the number itself gets bigger. We threw that one in for the fans.

• Health bars

For a game about healthy snacks, it was nearly impossible to tell how much health you had left in the old version. There was a little number in the corner of the screen and it mostly blended in with the background anyway. Now both you and your enemy have a big, red, chunky healthbar with a number over top. The bar slides down in an alternate colour to show how much damage you took from each attack. Makes getting hurt and hurting others a lot more fun.

• Friend screen

Now after each battle you're taken to a separate screen where you can choose from a random selection of 3 friends. Adds a bit more variety than the old version where you could choose the same friends in the same order every time

II. Bugs

Completely reworked the algorithm that detects your score, it works (almost?) flawlessly now. Also fixed some major exploits where you could ignore some of the games rules and win easily.

III. Tutorial!

The game now makes an effort to teach you how to play it. This helps with the abstract mechanics with no explanation thing that Rogapol games tend to suffer from.

Made the pixel size on the dice consistent with the rest of the art. One guy got really mad at me during the jam for scaling up the dice (rightfully so). Hopefully he sees this and rejoices.

Also added a heat haze shader on the background, it looks a bit less boring now.