What a great few weeks! Right around January 15th things really picked up in the productivity department and haven’t slowed down since. To that end, I’m happy to show the complete redesigned Punching Board! Those who are new or need a refresher on what the original punching board looked like can see here…
So what’s changed this time around? Quite a bit, not just visually but also mechanically. Although one might say the “spirit” of the original is still present. First, a minor change you’ll notice is a reduction in the number of rows. What was previously 3 rows (4 with the level bump) has now been modified to 2 rows (3 with the level bump). Long story short, the game should be strength focused and requiring people to stretch or move the board up and down with 3-4 rows was a bit excessive. Check out this screenshot of the new board. Wondering what the story behind this game is? Well, the Mythlink training room has had several faulty engines fall into your care. Naturally, the best way to deal with these is brute force! When an engine starts acting up whack it until it falls back into line!
Speaking of making the game more strength focused, let’s get into the single biggest change to the board- the newly added “hit point” values of each block and the player. Previously, each button would take a single swing to press down. Once that punch was successful, you would move on to the next button until finally 4 buttons were active at the same time. Once that 4th button was active it was game over. This made the game far too focused on speed rather than strength. To remedy this, the engines each have hit point values that gradually increase as the game’s level increases. This means it takes several strong swings to press down the engine successfully. If an engine gets too far out without being punched back, players will take a point of damage. Three points of damage taken and you’re done! This modification has made the game far more strength focused and makes more sense in the context of the type it is categorized under. There are a couple other changes, such as “boss” engines which glow red and have even more HP than regular engines, but I’ll leave those for players to discover. Oh, and did I forget to mention? The punching board is available NOW as a free update on Steam! Here are the patch notes detailing what has all changed and which known issues are still outstanding:
What’s New
- Added a new strength game: The “Board”
- Completely changed how scoring works for strength games, punches are now weighed far more heavily on the strength aspect more than the speed
- Added Sound effects for lowering/raising of the punching bag
- Adjusted volume on various sound effects and the background music
- Added new text for description of the games modes
- Changed some of the game descriptions text
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a problem where multipliers weren’t being correctly added in some situation in the strength games
- Fixed a problem where the multiplier in strength games could sometimes go beyond the intended maximum value
- Fixed a problem with the high score display
- Fixed a problem where achieving high scores for strength games wasn’t showing effects
- Adjusted the brain games to allow expansion of more games (now falls in line with the standard set in strength games)
Outstanding Issues
- There is a bug where sometimes when a player grabs a piece in the puzzle game it gets “stuck” in the hand and cannot be released. I’ve struggled and failed to recreate this bug or find any sort of cause. Will keep an eye on it and hopefully track it down eventually
Before I depart, I will bestow a brief preview of at least one change that will be coming to Mythlink in March (or sooner!) This change is…the naming of the training games. Probably long overdue, but the naming of the training exercises is far too bland. Puzzle? Bag? Board? Terribly boring names. Look forward to the new exciting names soon and until then, have fun!