Shops, and Other News

 

If you like Let's Plays, YouTuber Peace of the Puzzle is playing through Blackshift 1.24 (that's the old one, not this remake) here.

In other news, I've finally finished shops, which will be in the next update. In a shop, you can spend those little blue crystals you find everywhere to buy useful items. All the items are optional; they're just things that make life easier.

Things you can buy at the moment include:

• Nukes. Old Blackshift fans will remember these. Skip an entire level by blowing it up.
• Save Crystals. These let you save anywhere in a level by creating your own save point.

Things I gotta do before Blackshift is ready for release:

• Make sure the progression of levels makes sense and introduces new things at a reasonable pace. The world map layout is a bit random at the moment. The early islands in particular are too non-linear. And some useful items only get introduced right near the end of the game.
• Get rid of the remaining placeholder graphics
• Add missing music for menu, caves, space and end credits.
• Finish the Level Pit
• Polish off the UI
• Make the difficulty indicators actually work
• Introduce some sort of upload limit. You guys are good, but I just know someone out there will want to spam 100 levels a day.

To tide you over, I've uploaded a Pit level called Research Lab with some new items I've been trying out. Dunno if these will be in the next update or not, but I kinda like them, so they'll probably show up at some point.