Lenna’s Inception has come a long way in the three months since beta9. Beta10 is almost here, so here’s a quick roundup of screenshots and information I’ve been sharing on twitter!

The storyline has been mostly implemented. Just the endings, and the optional side-quests are missing right now. The laboratory and palace locations have been redesigned and reimplemented, along with hand-designed puzzles you’ll need to solve to get through them.

The laboratory has fallen into disrepair:

In the palace, you’ll need to figure out how to get through a locked door, while the key sits on the other side:

Another, smaller hand-designed location has been added, but to avoid spoilers, all I’ll say for now is that you’ll need the missinglasses to reach it.

Thanks to some improvements I made to world generation, the generator can now handle larger buildings:

And the overworld and dungeon generators now mix in a larger set of prefab (hand-designed) elements, to give the world some more of the character I wanted it to have:

And dungeons (and caves) are generated with a wider variety of room shapes and sizes. Corridors exist now! (Click for larger version.)

Jay has continued to make progress on the ‘advance’ (32-bit) graphics mode, however this won’t be ready for release with beta10.

As we’ve found out through the course of adding this new mode, ‘upgrading’ the graphical style is not as simple as replacing the art assets.

The original graphical style was fashioned after the Gameboy Color, whereas Jay’s new graphics are designed to be more like games on the Gameboy Advance. What we didn’t realize was that when you see screenshots from games on one of these consoles, you also assume certain other properties of video games on that console hold true. Properties like the level of interactivity, whether it’s important that perspective and scale are correct, the framerate of animations, how much tiles visibly repeat, etc… Games that violate your intuition about these properties just look plain bad.

So every update since the announcement of these new graphics, I’ve been adding new systems and features to the engine to make sure it can provide a consistent experience.

Some things I’ve done for that in this update are:

An experimental tile variant system so that the same tiles can come in different varieties and can be seen to repeat less often.

Some tile variants can be animated, like these torches:

A new system for adding basic animated insects and other critters to specific biomes in the game.

The main thing that has been holding up the release of beta10 has been the lack of Apple hardware to test the game on at home. I released the beta9 with some major Mac-specific bugs in it and I wanted to make sure I didn’t make that mistake again.

The good news is that my new hardware has arrived just today, and I should be able to fix these bugs and thoroughly test the game real soon. I expect to release beta10 in the next week or two.

As always, for the latest updates on what I’ve been doing, you can follow me on twitter: @tccoxon. I usually post a new Lenna’s Inception screenshot every weekend.