It's been a busy few months! The game now officially has a beginning and ending, complete with cutscenes, credits and some cool surprises. I hope those of you lucky and dedicated enough enjoy what's store for the last legs of your journey!

We've tested the Linux and Windows versions of Turbo Fat and everything seems to work on Steam OK! With that of the way, we've also started working Steam integration, including Achievements and Stats so that you can compare your progress with your friends and aim for 100%.

After some discussions with the community discord, I think we've reached a happy medium where the achievements will be tough but not too frustrating. There are some insane white-knuckle challenges which nobody's come close to completing, but I think I'll leave those out of the achievements and leave them just to bragging rights!

I've started polishing some of the rough edges of the game's UI, including adding a fullscreen option and better gamepad support but there's still some work to do before I'm happy with it. The creature and level editors still need a complete overhaul, and the UI could use some prettying up. But we're slowly getting there!

We've added a new type of cheese piece for some later levels! These triangular pieces are powerful but come with their own limitations too, and will force you learn a whole new set of techniques.

We've redesigned Career mode to only give you 3 lives -- if you lose all your lives you'll have to start over from the start of the chapter.

Career mode's new hardcore levels give you a chance at an extra life... but they're harder, and you only get ONE life on them. They're a worthwhile risk for some of the harder areas!

This month we've wrapped up development of the new "Cannoli Sandbar" area with a bunch of new levels centered around Asparagus, a puzzle mechanic designed to get in your way.



These asparagus obstacles are incredibly versatile, obstructing the next queue, replacing high-scoring cake and snack boxes with useless veggies, and leaving obnoxious horizontal holes all over the playfield.

They can even spear parts of your piece in mid-air, transforming your versatile "L-piece" into a baffling "Semicolon block"? What the heck even is that thing!!!

We've added a new tropical area "Kflab" with new characters, visuals and cutscenes.



There's an entire new island area and 20 new cutscenes, featuring a cast of 5 new characters including a sarcastically self-aware panda bear "Pandon" who has some mild antisocial tendencies, and "King Frungle Lumps III" -- a green tentacle-mouthed monstrosity with a very silly name. And you'd better recite his entire name correctly on the first try or you'll never hear the end of it!

New levels are coming next month, with some maddening new gimmicks and frustrating twists to learn. We can't wait to share them with you!

After two months exploring the new version of the Godot engine, it seems it's not quite ready for the awesome features required by Turbo Fat yet -- so we're sticking with the older version!

However all is not lost, as we've ported a few of the coolest improvements and bugfixes from our exploratory work into the older version of the engine, including a few bugs reported by the Turbo Fat community, and retroactively applying fixes to our tween and particle systems to make things run more smoothly.

We're starting work on a fun new tropical area, and we can't wait to share it with you. Stay tuned!

This release adds nine new levels featuring sharks. Many of them are in Poki Desert and a few are in the later levels as well.

Sharks eat parts of your pieces, letting clever players reshape them to fit into tight gaps or make high scoring boxes in some new and clever ways! (CHOMP)

Nighttime levels! Oooh, spooky!

Chapter 3 (Poki Desert) introduces three nighttime levels featuring the new "Night Onion". This onion periodically casts the playfield in darkness, testing both your memory and your strategy.

You must balance fast and efficient play with organizing the playfield in an intuitive way. ...Vertical stacks are a lot harder to work with when you have to remember all the pieces in them!

There are about 10 new levels in total, making use of this clever new mechanic. I hope you'll enjoy playing them!

I'm still hard at work on Turbo Fat! In addition to adding the Steam page this month, I've added several cheats to make the game more accessible for novices, and improved the game's Spanish localization!

Players accustomed to Tetris were often asking for line pieces and hold pieces. I think these go against the design of Turbo Fat, but I've enabled them through a Cheat menu. I'm all about players "finding their own fun" so if these features make the game more fun for you, go nuts!

The cheat menu also includes a way of slowing things down if the game is too difficult! No matter your skill level, the game should now be able to be completed by anyone. On the other end of the spectrum, you can speed the game up if you want an extra challenge!

Hish of the Turbo Fat discord has translated the entire game into Spanish! I've chased down a few minor UI glitches here and there with especially long Spanish phrases but overall it works seamlessly.