Hey there, Othello Fans! We at BlueLine Game Studios are happy to announce that we have just launched a Kickstarter for our newest game: Lost Cities! It uses the same great engine that we used for Othello and have been growing over the years for our other games. The game will be available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, as usual, and we hope to use the Kickstarter to fund a bunch of translations and a few other new bells and whistles. We hope you'll take a few minutes to check out the Kickstarter: http://bluelinegamestudios.com/kickstarter/lost-cities We also have already put out a demo for the game that you can check out on the Lost Cities Steam page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/520680/Lost_Cities/ Thanks for your continued support of BlueLine Games! Enjoy!

We've just released a bunch of updates & new languages for Othello:

• Added Spanish translation (thanks dani_as0!)
• Added Polish translation (thanks Ti_Ichigo from our LiveCoding.tv channel!)
• Old "Steam Notifications" have been deleted and any games that end will now get their notification deleted once both players have seen the end of the game.
• GamePad support for BlueLineCloudSignupDialog is no longer broken... can fill it out correctly, or skip it and play without an account just like with keyboard/mouse.
• Made resizing the window conform to the ratio instead of using letterboxing.
• The Online Game Menu Screen doesn't flicker when the list reloads now.
• Made Alert dialogs center in the screen correctly (they were slightly off-center before).
• Made it so that asynchronously created games also have the opponent's name added to the serverName when the 2nd player joins.

FINALLY!! :D More than two years after we started trying to get this license, today we are finally launching Othello to the world on Steam! We can't thank you all enough, for all of the support! The community has been great at making our previous releases successful, helping us tune the AI to the right level of difficulty, and helping us find bugs in prior releases so that the game would be good enough that we would get the approval to bring the Othello IP back to PC for the first time in years (decades?)! This launch comes with many fixes since the last version was pushed (listed way down below). Also, a big heartfelt thanks to Othello World Champion, Ben Seeley and to Benkt Steentoft of the World Othello Foundation. Without their help, I never would have been able to navigate the tricky licensing situation and been able to capitalize on contacting Megahouse for a license, literally the same day they announced that they'd obtained the global rights. As a final note, we'd like to dedicate this launch to Goro Hasegawa (Satoshi Hasegawa) who originally patented this game in Japan back in 1971 and passed away this summer at the age of 83. Through his many years of work, along with his American counterpart James R. Becker, this great game and its community were built into a household staple and a globally-recognized source of endless fun. A minute to learn... a lifetime to master. Thank you, - Sean Colombo & Geoff Brown (BlueLine Game Studios) http://store.steampowered.com/app/307430 Updates since last build:

• Bugfix: The buttons for the second-player in a Lobby had regressed to not be mouse-clickable anymore (hotkeys still worked). Thanks dani_as0 and bentley_maniac for the reports.
• Fixed regression that was causing log-spam of loading SDF fonts.
• Fixed the occasional crash on Mac/Linux that occurred especially when entering the Online Game Menu screen very quickly after starting the program.
• Fixed a recently-developed crash when opening the Steam Overlay (eg: for Leaderboard or Achievements) in OSX.
• Fixed the case where you Leave a game during LoadingFromServer, then started another game (eg: local, or just a NEW online game) and the game thought it was still loading from server... forever.
• Fixed game-reconnections (if it says "Loading from game server..." at any point during a game, now it should succeed again. That was broken for a while... we just didn't notice because that only happens in weird cases anyway).
• Fixed the use-case where a host starts a game asynchronously with the opponent moving first, then a guest joins and makes a play, then the host would previously freeze in "Loading game from server...". Creating async games and having the opponent move should be fine now.
• Game warned "this game is rated" when forfeiting, even if it was not rated.
• Mac: fixed crashing that would happen in various versions of OS X on various machines. It was due to several versions of Mono crashing in different ways on different versions. We found an old version that works consistently.
• All users who owned this game under its previous name will be automatically upgraded and will keep ALL of their progress, stats, achievements, etc.. Thank you for being early adopters!

Fixed some really bad edge-cases that were caused by playing an online async game, then leaving it, then finishing a local game in the same run of the program. Please make sure you have the latest version (which was released on Saturday, Dec 12th) and you should be safe from any unwanted issues related to this. PS: If there is a steep sale on Reversi any time still in 2015, it will be the last steep sale we'll be able to do for quite a while! So grab it ;) Cheers!

Since our last release, we've made a lot of changes & are having a short sale to celebrate! Here are some of the changes:

• Rewrote our entire font rendering system to use a more scalable system. On users with huge high-resolution monitors, they should now be able to see the fonts as clearly as someone with a standard monitor. The new system is "Signed Distance Fields". For the curious, here is a youtube video that shows the general way in which they work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGZRHJvJYIg This change also allowed us to completely re-write how string-measurement works. After a ton of obsessing over the details, you'll notice that now, text is centered better in several spots in the app, and the Chat box looks less wonky. This is all due to being able to measure text very accurately.
• FNA/OpenGL fixes to support more graphics cards.
• Smaller log file
• Better display of users w/Apostrophes in their names, in the Online Game Menu Screen (OGMS).
• Fixed an occasional crash in OGMS ListView stuff.
• Made it so Passes get sent to the server by the last-mover since we know that player is online. This keeps the activePlayerId in sync better. Thanks to Emptiness for reporting.
• Elo Ratings can't be replayed from Steam Notifications now.

Improvements!

• Made a new AI level half-way between Beginner and Easy and shifted every level from Easy onward up one (so the old Easy is the new Medium, etc.)! This has been out for almost exactly a month at this point (sorry I'm behind on announcing stuff, these things all came out at slightly different times). This is the fourth version of the AI difficulty, hopefully it's about right this time!
• Fixed the Online Game Menu Screen crash that was happening on Mac OSX.
• Redid our release-process to remove a bunch of un-needed assets that were left around but weren't being cleaned up. This leads to less hard-drive space being used for the game, and significantly less bandwidth used for the initial install. This was a pretty big change. If you were to install Reversi game 3 times (once on Windows, Mac, and Linux) the total download required would have been 1.1 gigs (wow!) and now it is 295.2mb (DAT SAVINGS!)... for installing on all three OSes, the total hard-drive space required would have been 443.4mb, now it's 174.2mb. :D
• The logFile now has a .txt extension instead of .log. This makes it easier for users to open it, and makes it easier for us to open on our mobile-phones so we can provide support to people even when we're afk.
• Added "Join Steam Group" button.

Free game!

We just pushed out a bunch of fixes that had been piling up for a while (and some that we finally got fixed today after looking at them for far too long!). This release was for Windows, Mac, and Linux simultaneously.

• Fixed the serious bug where the AI sometimes wouldn't make a move... it would just sit there. HUGE thanks to the community (especially Diminutive Resplendence) for their help in debugging it. Couldn't have done it without you!
• Fixed the occasional 1-second stutter in the UI. It would happen about once every 40 seconds & it appeared at the previous release.
• LogFile.log is no longer part of the build, so if you "Verify Integrity of Game Cache" in Steam, it won't make you download the logfile over again.
• The BuildID is now in the log-file. This is useful for detecting if someone's Steam client is being stubborn and not upgrading their version of the game.
• Upgraded to Steam SDK 1.34 (newest version).
• 2D rendering improvements (mainly visible on the Rules and Online Game Menu Screen (OGMS) on slower computers.
• The occasional disappearing buttons in the OGMS are fixed.

• Fixed the "Rematch" functionality which hadn't worked correctly for online play since the move to BlueLine Cloud. Now it's good again.
• Sliders were very finicky for clicking/dragging before. They work as expected again.

All three platforms are now up to date with each other again. That makes life better for everyone. Here's what we've changed in the last few weeks:

• This update includes an upgrade of our library from Monogame-SDL2 (sorta FNA) all the way to the latest FNA.
• Performance improvements! (largely due to FNA upgrade... but not entirely). Depending on what part of the game you're in, it can do 10% to 20% more frames-per-second. If you're at 60 fps, then it just stops there (to not waste your CPU) but since the cap was always at 60 fps, you'll just be using less CPU!
• Bunch of Async fixes & tweaks
• We tweaked the BlueLine Cloud experience. Now, if you hit that "signup/connect" dialog, and you don't want to send us any of your super-secret-secret-data (ie: your email address), then you no longer have to put in a fake email... you can just hit "No Thanks" and you will get to play anyway.
• When you realize it was a bad idea NOT to set up an email address (because it's anti-DRM that lets you access your data outside of Steam), you can add that after-the-fact.
• We pushed back the Half-Life 3 release a few weeks to upgrade our internationalization. If you see anything wrong with the text in this release, please let us know. We looked though... it looked fine. Reeeeeally fine.
• GamePad support works in Linux again. That's really what forced us to update to the latest FNA ;) ...we've noticed some weird spots that don't work right with Gamepads (game settings, Rules dialog) so we'll be fixing those soon hopefully.

We fixed a handful of bugs. For now this update is only for Windows because we're still hammering on trying to fix game-pad support in Linux (so our Linux build is unstable right now). Here are some things that are fixed by this push:

• Crash when resuming a game against a player who wasn't connected to BlueLine Cloud
• "Peppermint" tiles in some Async games (extra tiles were rendering in the same spot as the real tiles).
• Rematches against the AI would get confused & the AI would pass because it was trying to make a move before the pieces were loaded onto the board.
• Could not create a lobby after joining (or re-joining) an async game.
• If you started an async game, then played your first move, if you left the game, it would show it as still being your turn.
• Various race-conditions!

First big update for Reversi!

• Red vs. Blue skin - we got skinning working, and added a Red vs. Blue skin. Press "F2" or check it out in the Settings menu. We're going to make it easier for us to make skins, then we hope to add quite a few more.
• Easier AI - we Nerfed the AI quite a bit. Now, the "Insane" level is quite a bit easier than the Medium level used to be. This was based on a lot of community-feedback and the fact that an Othello World Champion said that Medium beat him twice in a row (oops!). Please let us know how many levels you can beat now! :)
• Async bugfixes - there were 7 bug-fixes that we made. I spent all week doing these, and my assessment is that typing them all out would bore you to death, so I shall omit them. I DO NOT WANT TO CAUSE YOU DEATH!
• Async-game-starting - there are a decent number of online games getting played with Async functionality (not both players having to be on at once) but there was still the annoying problem of having to wait around for someone to join. NEVERMORE! Now, once you create an online game and hit "Ready", if nobody is there, you will get a "Start Alone" button. This will start the game (if it's your turn, you can even move!) but if you don't want to hang around waiting for someone to join, that's fine. Just leave the game & it will still stick around and be ready for the next passer-by to join it.
• DLC - Soon, we're going to be releasing DLC for different colored table-tops in the background. Everyone buys games on sale anyway, so this will give us a chance to get a few more dollars. This is closely related to the next bullet point (very important)...
• Microtransactions hellsyeah I love me some money. We ran some numbers and found that most games don't use all 64 tiles on the board. All but the top 10% of games, or so, use 60 tiles or less. Therefore, we decided that a fantastic way to monetize our core customer base would be to leverage the excitement of the final couple of moves! Now, each player starts with 30 tiles (including the 2 that are in the starting configuration) and if they want more than that, they can use micro-transactions to pay $0.10 for an extra glitter-covered "finishing tile" so you can finish in style! These are probably the best addition to the game. Some players might not like the extra glitter-covered finishing tiles, but please rest assured that we unanimously voted at our board-meeting tonight that this was the best way to maximize shareholder value given the recent changes in the market... most notably that it's only 11:15pm in my timezone, so it's still technically the first of April when I'm posting this announcement. ;) So, as you can guess, the date applies to both this bullet-point and the bullet-point above. Enjoy the update! :D
  
  [ 2015-04-02 03:15:52 CET ] [ Original post ]