This weekend should see the submission of Version 1.06 of The Lords of Midnight. It has a number of fixes and a couple of new features.It will likely be the last update, aside from a major bug fix, for the next month or so. Once reason for this is that I think I have exhausted a number of minor additions that I wanted to include. Over the month since the initial release, I have added about 20 new features, tweaked a number of features, and obviously had a number of fixes. I think somewhere in the region of 60 work items have gone into the last month.

Most of the bug fixes have not been major, but they do polish the game. Luckily, most of the changes should not had too much affect on players, unless you are particularly familiar with the workings of the original. I’m pretty happy now that the next release will bring the game as close to the original game play as I can get. I have a couple of more tests to do on a couple of possible problems with the AI over the next few days – just to ascertain if they are problems or not. But my initial gut feeling says they are not, but the proof is in the pudding.

Some of the feature changes again give the game more polish, but also help move toward Doomdark’s Revenge. So they have been worth the extra effort.

The main reason for not pushing out any more changes is that I need to move forward. I need to spend the next month getting the Desktop version complete. To be honest there isn’t much to do, but some of it is fiddly work. The identified changes are currently:-

1. Mouse Pointer – There needs to be one along with the context of what it is doing.
2. Resolution selector – The user needs to be able to choose which resolution to run in.
3. Full screen – The user needs to be able to toggle running full screen or in a window.
4. Graphics – The underlying assets need streamlining.

Of the above, option 4 is of interest, because I am hoping that this will help reduce the size of the assets required for the mobile version, and make it easier to include graphic sets in later releases.

After that, I can’t honestly see much that must be changed to make the desktop version. I play it all the time on my desktop. The above changes just tidy it up.

Once the desktop version is complete and shipped, I can then move on to Doomdark’s Revenge.

Over the months that I develop Revenge, I will trickle more features into LoM. But I will only start that once I break that back of the initial development. I would like to release a version by the middle of the year that includes some difficulty level changes and new scenarios. I would be nice for you to be able to replay the game a number of ways with different challenges.