It's finally here! Since submitting Grid Wizard to the GMTK 2024 Game Jam, we've been hard at work polishing, balancing, and expanding the game into a (slightly) more complete version. Thanks to everyone who played and rated Grid Wizard during the jam! With that out of the way, here are the changenotes for version 0.2.0:

Features

• Added a Linux build! I haven't tested this (at all) so it may be broken. Please let me know!
• The upgrade screen now has a button to preview card transmutations and a button to skip drafting a card to your deck
• Added deck view! You can now click on your deck or discard to see its contents, sorted by card name
  
• Changed the way your turn is resolved. Now blocks are activated one at a time, in reading order
  
• Changed the way enemy encounters are selected; Brute is added to the enemy pool in round 5
• Added a new enemy, the Kobold Rogue! This enemy is added to the enemy pool in round 10
• Added 9 new cards: Battering Ram, Crystal Bow, Drain Life, Hail, Hwacha, Incision, Mana Stream, Obsidian Bow, Shapeshifter
• Added enemy ability "Group Shield"
  
• Added enemy ability "Pierce Attack"
• Added enemy ability "Exhaust"
• Added card effect "Pierce"
• Added card effect "Solitary"
  
• Added card effect "Exposed"
  

QOL Changes

• Added a settings menu where the volume can be adjusted. I will add more options here when I have time
• Updated the How to Play screen with more information
• Added SFX for the grid cursor, cards, picking/placing/rotating blocks, and all enemy actions. I'm not done adding SFX yet, but this should be enough to satisfy the people who asked for it during the jam
  
• Added hotkeys to instantly clear the grid (X,R,Backspace)
• Added hotkey to toggle the transmute button (Spacebar)
• Added another hotkey to rotate held shapes (Right Click)
• Persist shapes now show 1 instead of nothing when they have one turn remaining
• Added animation for shapes returning to hand
  
• Sprite swaps. Yellows should now be more vibrant and purple should be more distinct from red. Also, every block color now has a unique symbol so that they can be more easily distinguished with colorblindness
  
• Added tooltips to many UI elements that explain potentially confusing aspects of them
  
• The version number is now always displayed in the bottom-right corner of the screen
  

Balance Changes

• Lots of card 
• Tetwiz now has 50 maximum hp, up from 40
  
• Enemies now start with higher values in their specialty abilities
  
• Enemy ability values now scale slower. Attacks and shields take turns scaling by 1 every round, and heals scale by 1 every four rounds. Heal and Pierce Attack take turns scaling by 1 every two rounds.
  

Bug Fixes

• Adjacency effects behaved as if they were value 1
• Shape adjacency was pretty much completely broken. I had forgotten to offset the check by the block's current position, whoops!
  
• Causing two music transitions within 1 second of each other caused the music to go silent until the next transition
• Some shapes were unable to be placed in the top-left corner of the grid
• Grabbing some cards with a null effect caused an instant crash
• Killing any enemy would change the selected enemy to the closest living enemy, even if the killed enemy wasn't selected. Now this only happens when you kill the selected enemy
  
• Trying to interact with your hand (clicking cards, using the transmute button) while it wasn't your turn was causing issues. It should no longer be possible to interact with your hand between the time you click the end turn button and the time your hand is drawn for the next round
  
• Rewrote most of the code for the grid system from scratch. The old version was written poorly and was causing lots of edge-case issues, this version should be much more stable
  

What's Next?

Updates may slow down as I enter the fall semester at university, but I plan to keep updating the game until I feel it is in a finished state for a free game. Some high-level goals for this include:

• Save file slots that can be saved to and loaded from
• More roguelike-esque run-based gameplay loop with premade encounters, more upgrade options, and a final boss... instead of the current endless mode
• More polish with respect to UX/UI, animations, sound effects, and music

If you like the game and wish to follow development or become a playtester, come join our discord server!