rectball

• The game will not restart on Android after changing the window screen (split screen, mainly).
• Internal refactors.

• Fixed: The screen was not being kept on in mobile phones even when the setting was enabled.
• Fixed: The statistics screen will now display durations as a clock (0:22:14) rather than as an amount of seconds (1334).
• Fixed: Parts of the interface were rendering outside the screen on a small subset of devices.

This release contains minor fixes that enhances support for the PC platform mainly.

• Enhanced compatibility with small mobile screens. Fixes bugs related to elements not fitting in the screens.
• Fixed the PC version to be resizable (Windows, macOS, X11, Wayland).

This is a hotfix release to address some issues in the Android version.

• Fixes the game settings screen sometimes not showing anything.
• Fixes the game not starting on some phones after upgrading the app from an older version.

Note: Retroactive tag, originally released 2024-01-12

• Game is now available for download on Windows, macOS and GNU/Linux.
• Game is now playable on web browser via the itch.io page.

Known issues:

• Android: the game does not open if you have app backups enabled and you ever played earlier versions of the game (a patch is in progress, please have patience or avoid upgrading to 438)
• Windows, macOS: the operating system will trigger security warnings on first run.
• Windows, GNU/Linux: the game window doesn't scale properly on high DPI screens.
• Windows, macOS, GNU/Linux: the game is not saving data into the proper location, all your progress will be unfortunately erased in a future release.

Note: Retroactive tag, originally released 2024-01-03

• Drops semantic versioning, adopts sprint + build number.
• Added support for phones with screen cutouts.
• New game visual style, still in progress: new buttons, new sounds.
• New appearance for the main menu, settings, statistics and about page.
• Added vibration during gameplay; checkbox in settings.
• Added a toggle to disable keeping the screen always on; checkbox in settings
• Removed toggle to enable legacy fullscreen mode.
• Removed buttons to share screenshot.

• Updated: tutorial updated to the new input system.
• Added: new animations in the tutorial.
• Fixed: disable multitouch in the board.
• Dev: rewrote the tutorial screen in Kotlin.
• Dev: refactored the UI components into the Hud component.

• Added: new system to select combinations based on dragging.
• Removed: integration with Google Analytics.
• Fixed: switches in the settings screen may not render properly on some devices.
• Dev: updated all system dependencies (libGDX, Gradle, Android...)
• Dev: replaced custom Google Play Games integration with gdx-gamesvcs.
• Dev: system components get cleaned up and rewritten in Kotlin.

Wasn't my intention to release this early, but there are bugs to fix. I'm working on the new input method for 0.5.

Visible changes

• Fixes a regression introduced in v0.4.10 that caused the game to ignore the fullscreen setting value when enabling fullscreen at the beginning of the game.
• It's not required to restart the game to switch fullscreen mode.

Internal changes

• More code is ported to Kotlin.
• Replaced libGDX's I18NBundle with Android strings.

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Oh boy, vacation has been productive.

Changes

• Fixed a regression introduced in Rectball 0.4.9 that made it impossible to activate fullscreen mode in Android 4.3 and older.
• New datafile storage format. No more local files, statistics and high scores will be saved now in the statistics.

Now what?

I don't expect more 0.4 releases. Next release is 0.5. It will finally tackle the current input system - selections will be made by drag and drop instead of by tapping four times the screen. I don't have an estimated time for that, but if I keep working on small steps, it should not take too much time.

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This is a hotfix release designed to fix regressions found in v0.4.9. See the original changelog for v0.4.9 for a list of changes.

• Settings were not being properly saved, so any change to the settings would not be actually remembered next time the game loads. This has been fixed as a critical regression because on new installations it would not remember the choice made when the user is asked about the Tutorial and it would be annoying.
• Statistics were not being properly saved, although this issue was introduced in 0.4.8. I've just taked the chance to patch it now instead of waiting to 0.4.10 and causing you more anger.

Will I ever make a release without having to release a hotfix two hours later?

You never know when a new Rectball release will arrive!

Changes

• Android O (8.0) is officially supported.
• Android I (4.0) or above is now required to run the game.
• Minimum OpenGL ES version is now set to 2.0. This was already the case before, i.e., you could not run the game on phones that only support OpenGL ES 1.x, but it wasn't enforced by the Play Store, so you could install the game on a phone not supporting OpenGL ES 2.0 even though opening the game would fail.
• Blurry fonts have finally been fixed (#59). To celebrate this, the main game typography has changed.
• 'Colorblind' mode has been renamed to 'Colorblind mode' to make more clear the purpose.
• The notification and status bar sometimes were not properly hidden in fullscreen mode - #76. This may have been fixed now, or not.
• Removed Platforms API because desktop support was removed.

I'm still using Android 2.x and I'm mad

This release is not compatible with phones and tablets running Android 2.2, 2.3 and 3.x. Sorry for not being able to provide support for your 7 year old Android version, but the Google Play libraries the GPE version use require Android 4.0 or greater.

If you still have such an old operating system, the OSP version will probably work on Android 2.2+, although it has not been tested. Note that changing the minSdkVersion property in app/build.gradle is required to support Android 2.2.

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This release is a hotfix for the Google Play Edition failing to properly start and force crashing. It fixes the connection with Google Play servers. This release does not affect the Open Source version and doesn't change the core project, although it has introduced an offset against the version code that I'll have to fix later.

This release focuses on adding a few long-time requested features to the game. Also, I have updated a lot of library versions in order to make future changes easier. Future versions will continue adding long-requested features and making small changes to the codebase to make it easier to maintain. No expected dates.

• Combinations are now unselected as soon as a ball with the wrong color is selected (fixes #56).
• Less score will be given for combinations made using a hint (#61).
• Statistics will now display how many hints have you used (#70).
• More time is now rewarded for better combinations (#72).
• A share button has been added to the Statistics screen (#50).

Also I have made a few changes to the development process in order to make release and deployment easier in the future.

• Dropped support for desktop. Rectball is now mobile first game. I'm doing this because keeping the Java Desktop version in pace with the changes I'm doing in the Android project is hard.
• Google Play Edition is now open source. This means that it is possible to build a version linked against Google SDK. No API keys have been uploaded so the project will fail to build.
• Both Google Play Edition and Open Source Edition will coexist as flavors. Just use releaseGpe or releaseOsp as Gradle tasks when building the project.

Known issues:

• Game fonts are still blurry - #59.

Please report issues at the issue tracker.

Download the game for Android here:

This is a critical hotfix that fixes a bug found during statistics loading on Rectball Beta 4.6. If you upgraded recently to Rectball 0.4.6 you should upgrade inmediately to Rectball 0.4.7. It has been already deployed to Google Play. Make sure you upgrade to v0.4.7 if you upgraded to v0.4.6.

Changes (since v0.4.6 only had a lifespan of a few hours, I'm including changes for v0.4.6 here too):

• Fixed: Statistics aren't correctly loaded - #66
• Fixed: Fix game crashing when pressing Back while the game is loading - #58
• Fixed: Fix game crashing under some circunstances - #64

Known issues:

• Game fonts are blurry - #59.

Please report issues at the issue tracker.

Download the game for Android here:

Do not upgrade to v0.4.6 if you don't want your stats corrupt. A bug was found on the local statistics system for v0.4.6. Statistics won't be loaded anymore from the local data. Local data is not lost unless a game is played. In that case, they might be overwritten and reset.

I'm back! A few fixes for this release that were mostly pending to be released back in the days. I'll be doing my best for fixing already opened bugs before implementing new features.

• Fixed: Fix game crashing when pressing Back while the game is loading - #58
• Fixed: Fix game crashing under some circunstances - #64

Known issues:

• Game fonts are blurry - #59.

Please report issues at the issue tracker.

Download the game for Android here:

This iteration has had less changes than usual. This is because:

1. Personal reasons. Tough week for me.
2. Most of the changes are internal.
   • I want to add Kotlin support. Because who could not love Kotlin, I ask. This will happen first.
   • I would like to add HTML5 support. I don't know it's possible since GWT is a transpiler that requires Java source code, while Kotlin generates Java bytecode. A quick search on the interwebs is suggesting me to go for TeaVM, will give it a try. HTML5 support would make the game run on almost any platform provided it has a web browser.

Changes:

• dec0b2b - Fixed a bug on the Score actor: when the user reaches 10.000 and the animation pops in, it was adding more score than what it should.
• 4552142 - New font rendering system. Uses BitmapFont instead of Freetype. Freetype does not work on HTML5 so I'm falling back to BitmapFont. Removing the freetype libs and the TTF files reduces the size of the app again.

Report bugs at the issue tracker.

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This is a minor release with improovements and bug fixes over Beta 4.3. The cleanup and memory management is almost finished and by now the game should be less laggy and more responsible. This patch also introduces lots of bugfixes found previously.

• Android: game state is saved when the game is minimized using Android SavedState Bundle. Therefore, you shouldn't lose your game again by minimizing the game and restoring it later.
• Android: added better fullscreen support. Now you can even decide whether you want fullscreen or not.
• Changed e7efd01 - 2x assets have been removed. They were only visible on Mac OS X anyway, so I'm removing them to save more than half a megabyte in space.
• Added #48 - Bonus combinations now have a different color so that you can better know when you have received some extra score because of a large combination.
• Fixed #52 - Fixed a race condition on the Help button that made it give wrong combinations sometimes.
• Fixed #53 - Fixed an infinite loop that could happen sometimes on the Game Over screen.
• Fixed #54 - Android: fixed a bug where the navigation bar wouldn't hide sometimes when restoring the game.

Report bugs at the issue tracker.

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This is a minor release with improovements to the stability of Rectball. I have decided to freeze Beta 5 until I can better handle some issues such as memory leaking and memory footprint. This patch introduces some changes to that, but I'm not finished. Expect at least one more patch for Beta 4 (0.4.4). This patch introduces the following changes:

• Fixed: Fixed a memory leak on the GameScreen (a934a31).
• Changed: Introduce screen caching to some screens (8c8f186).

Report bugs at the issue tracker.

Download the game for Android here:

This is a minor release that fixes some bugs with Rectball Beta 4.1 in the Open Source version as well as with the Google Play Services integration for the Android version.

• Added: #49 - Extra time is given when you make a Perfect combination.
• Fixed: #47 - Game should not close again on Android when pressing Back on Game Over screen.
• Fixed: #51 - Hints should not behave uncorrectly again.
• Fixed: Sharing button should now work on Android 6.0

Known Issues:

• Memory footprint still makes Android kill Rectball when minimized

Download the game for Android here: