I showed one of the help screens last time. Here’s all of them:

Yeah, they’re pretty dense, even though I tried to be as concise as possible. I know a lot of people will never bother actually reading any of it, and one day I might get some time to replace it all with better, context-specific help that guides players as they go. But it’s something that’s there if people need help for now. Hey, Minecraft did pretty well with no in-game help whatsoever.

I’m adding time limits on game rounds right now. So if servers are left running, you can have games take 30 mins, and hour, whatever. So you won’t join a game where someone’s been playing for 8 hours with a score of 1000 that you can never hope to catch. And conveniently it can also act as a safety measure if it needs to – if there are any bugs or memory leaks around that I haven’t found by release, at least they’ll probably be cleared when the round resets instead of staying around until the server shuts down.

Here’s the actual list of what I have left to do before I can release the game publicly:

– Basic timed map resets for games (in progress).

– Making a new game trailer, release marketing and updating the website, forum posts etc.

– Testing and balancing part stats.

– Checking both the main app and server for memory leaks, and fixing if necessary.

– Updating the demo version.

– Check controller support.

– Setting up and confguring a bunch of Steam stuff.

– Final big testing of everything and fixing as necessary, especially Internet play.

– Check what happens when players don’t have enough bandwidth to keep up and handle as necessary.

– Link Kickstarter backers to a couple of reward items.

– Fix a bug with vehicles falling badly onto the build screen.

– Maybe set up a couple of “official” servers run on some US Amazon/cloud type thing? Check costs/bandwidth.

That’s it.

Note: My sweet ramp vehicle unfortunately does not work as majestically with networked physics as it does against this local AI.