This is a Post about the game Too Many Birds!™ – get it here!
Update 1.1 is here!
This update features many general improvements, many new features and completely updates the match 3 section!
General Overview
The Update Includes:
- Nest Improvements
- Birds Show their birthdays! Get ready for parties next year…
- The Green Hill has had a graphical improvment
- The shop now has tabs for better organisation!
- Eggs now show a timer for how close they are to hatching – you can also insta-hatch them now – for a price!
- Tickling birds makes them love you more! This is shown with the hearts they emit!
- Moving toys is far easier (this was snuck into the hotfix last month, but it stopped you moving eggs around – you can do that now!)
- Made poops less likely to appear under toys or food bowls – no more secret messes!
- There is now a Daily Gift as a reward for playing for consecutive days
- The new Bell currecny has been added – this is used to purchase special items and can be earned through the Daily gift, clearing levels with an exceptional number of moves left, or by watching an Ad
- Many Match 3 Game Improvements
- A new level select menu!
- Replay old levels for half-reward
- Skip levels that are a nuisance!
- New Graphics!
- Some of these snuck into the hotfix last month, but we’ve upgraded board appearance, tweaked other tiles and enhanced some colors (Colored tiles should have better contrast for color-blind users too)
- New Boosters!
- The Instant Seedball – Pop any fruits you like at no move cost!
- The Mega Hammer – Annoying tile ruining your day? USE A HAMMER TO SMASH IT AWAY!
- New Goals!
- We’ve added eggs that hatch into birds when you match next to them
- There’s a new colored tile to smash
- The new “Fruit Collector” goal will have you feeding your birds certain fruits in order to win!
- New Animations!
- All powerups, obstacles and tiles have new animations and sounds when interacted with, to provide a much nicer looking experience
- New Obstacles!
- Card Tubes – Fruits and other tiles can fall down these to provide some interesting layouts!
- Chained cages – now it’s even harder to get to what’s inside the cage!
- Wooden boxes – Break them down with adjacent matches to find what’s inside!
- Rock piles – much like rocks, but need breaking down!
- Perspex Tiles – These prevent you from touching what’s behind!
- There are new tutorials in-game for all new tiles
- Over 80 new levels!
- The option to get another 5 moves if you’re close to beating the level, but have no more moves
- A new level select menu!
- More Settings
- Primarily for dealing with curved screens, there is now a UI padding option and a Button Scale option. These each increase the margin between the edge of the screen and button size, respectively
- The option to disable cloud sync is now available. This reduces load time and internet usage when disabled, but stops multiple devices from being synchronised
- Added a credits listing to the options page – now you can see the people that made this game possible!
- Other Technical Improvements
- These may not interest the majority of people, but I want to list them anyway for those curious
- Fixed a couple of rare crashes
- On some devices, Nest-Icon generation could crash the game on startup. This appears to be resolved
- An incredibly rare freeze related to text boxes has been fixed. These only occured on certain aspect ratios, and only with new text. It may have never occured prior to this update, but now it never will
- A couple of other “SIGSEGV SEGV_MAPERR” errors have been fixed. Again, very rare, but they happened and I think they’re gone now.
- Did some text tweaks
- The font renderer was updated to make text appear far less blurry
- Shop descriptions are now left-justified and scale better
- Shop prices scale better and now show their currency
- Text Alert boxes should have better text sizes
- A huge optimisation went into bird textures
- This reduces texture cost drastically, and allows us to make more facial expressions. It’s also important groundwork for the “Birdy Fashion Update”
- This should also speed up render time a lot, making the game run better on lower-spec devices
- Fixed some memory leaks
- Basically, nest render output and scrollbox contents weren’t properly deleted. This wasn’t a problem unless you played for a long time without minimising the game (minimising forces a clear of textures, so this solved the problem temporarily, but now it’s properly fixed)
- Removed an unused audio file, reducing game size by a few MB
- Stopped cloud data overriding the number of lives you had left. It was basically a pointless workaround to an exploit that didn’t exist. Don’t code when you’re tired!
- Used some alternating icons for close buttons when opening menus to make it more obvious the action was changing
- Changed some button sizes
- Updated the internal save system.
- No-one should see any difference within their nests right now, but this was hugely imortant groundwork for the development of more interesting toys, bird relationships and fashion
- Upgraded Google Play Services from 9.X to 11.6.0
- This should show better errors if Services is not installed, reduce risk of crashes and speed up the login process a little
- If you’ve ever used GameMaker, you can probably guess how awkward this was to do
- Added delays to certain action boxes (like tutorials) to prevent accidental skipping
What’s Next?
Well, first, you should try out the new update!
The next update is going to be interesting! We want to have something around February time, with 5 new birds. Where 1.1 focused mainly on small enhancements and the tile game, I want 1.2 to focus more on the nest aspects.
We also want to get a version on Android Fire and try to get an iOS version working, but I’m not sure how hard that will be yet. It could be ready by Feb, but worst-case, it could take up to a year.