I figure since people are buying the game on the condition that I'm gonna finish it, I better let you guys know how it's going  LOL so this post will summarize what's been going on with me and the game.

SAGE 2023 Demo

It went well! Cosmogelica wasn't the most popular game, but it's a niche game so I'm not surprised. People did play it though and they quite liked what they played, so that's really cool! More people are aware of the project now, and I'm slowly (but surely) finding my audience for it.  The demo was downloaded a decent amount on both Itch and SFGHQ, and I even made some sales on the early access version (shoutout to people who bought it and also gave me a tip, you're very appreciated.)  If you didn't know, I also got Cosmogelica a Steam page, so you can go wishlist it, if you like. People who buy the game on Itch will get a key they can activate that wont let them play right now, but will let them play on Steam when the game releases.

Solitaire Minigame

As a way to decompress after all the work I had to do to get the demo going and also get the game a Steam page, I decided to do something small and fun and put a solitaire minigame. It'll be in the next (paid) version of the game, and supports keyboard and mouse as well as gamepads. I wanted to add it because I like solitaire and also, I felt the vertical orientation of the playfield was perfect for it. I have some other thoughts about fun modes I can include besides Solitaire and Freedraw, but their inclusion is lower priority compared to just making the rest of the game.

Roadmap

I spent some time organizing my Trello cards and creating a spreadsheet with all the planned features of the game, and pretty much just mapping out what I have left to do. You can view it here.  The spreadsheet is incomplete, and not everything that's on here will make it into the game since, sometimes stuff seems fun on paper but isn't fun in practice. I had a lot of this stuff on my Trello, but it was more difficult to keep track of progress this way there. You can keep this link on hand if you like, as I'll be updating it as I progress more on the game.

Menu and Drawing Changes

I got some feedback about the menus, specifically the video menu, where you could accidentally apply settings like the rotation and make it incredibly difficult to undo it. Now, there's this little menu that pops up that allows you to pick what you want and doesn't apply it until you've selected it. I've also added a "Stretch to Fit" function, which does exactly what it says on the tin. The hope is that it'll make it easier to try to fit on CRTs, but you can also make this super wide abomination as seen below.

When working on the Stretch to Fit function, I also refactored the drawing code. I fixed a bunch of bugs relating to screen rotation  and aspect ratio, and more importantly, fixed mouse cursor mapping issues that plagued certain configurations. I'm hoping that I've solved all the bugs, but the screen size/rotation options have been the bane of development on this one, so I'm sure there will be more bugs lmao

Pretty Gems

I'm currently working on these Pretty Gems that you find out in space. The general idea is that for each group of 10 phases, 5 of them will appear randomly across the 10 phases, and you'll have to try to collect all 5. I haven't exactly figured out what happens when you do, but I'm thinking extra points. I *was* thinking about maybe having a minigame, but I don't want to break up the flow too much. We'll see how it all pans out.

That's all for now!

I've been pretty busy with non-development aspects of the game, as well as some IRL stuff that was going on, so I haven't been able to add *too* much since the last build update. Therefore, it'll be a little while before the next build, since I like to put a substantial amount of stuff in each major build, so I'll just have to ask for your patience. Thank you all, and if you haven't yet, please consider buying the game in early access! It helps me out a lot, really.