Category: Development

I’ve just released an update to my latest game (rolling out on Android shortly), with the following contents:

• Overhauled the Mouse Guide system so that the player can toggle between mouse types and an inactive guide, rather than unlocking guides once and then being unable to inactivate them.
• Added the ability to skip dialogue at the start and end of a room if the room has previously been completed.
• Increased the speed of Undo/Redo in rooms, and added the ability to reset the room in one step by pressing ‘R’ (WebGL version only).
• Fixed a bug with the Undo/Redo system that occasionally led to an Ace score being awarded even when the room was completed with more than one movement.
• Fixed a bug where a previous dialogue box would sometimes reappear at the start of a later dialogue before being overriden.
• Corrected a few spelling/grammatical mistakes.

Unfortunately for those of you who have been playing Miriam’s Mice on Newgrounds, I will not be able to publish this update there. (Technical details: this is because I’m using Unity’s PersistentDataPath to store save data, and due to how Newgrounds hosts WebGL games, a new upload would have a different path, and thus it would lose everybody’s save data – an unacceptable side effect for such a lengthy and challenging game.) At least none of these fixed bugs were game-breaking. If you were one of the people who was awarded a star despite not actually acing a room, I’m sorry for how anticlimactic that must have been! If you have the motivation, you can always try and ace it properly, even if there’s no extra reward remaining.

UPDATE: I’ve now also released v1.11 to correct a bug introduced in v1.1 (whoops!) – now the game won’t freeze when toggling colour-blind mode.
Thanks to those of you who alerted me to the issue! As always, you can send bug reports to david@wigdev.com

Hi all, this is just a brief check in from Mr WigDev. (Hmm… nope, not using that nickname again.)

Thanks to everyone who sent me bug reports and suggestions for my Miriam’s Mice Beta. Those paying close attention will notice I’ve stopped updating it – my attention is now solely on the final version of the game, and the latest tweaks and improvements have only been added to this (currently unpublished) version. Feel free to send me more bug reports and suggestions, but the beta has been updated to its final state. (…Unless another fatal issue is found I suppose – which is entirely possible!)

I still have the last stages of testing to do on the final version (some music triggers and animation timings are misbehaving between different platforms, ugh) but as soon as I’m done, I’ll let you know here how you can access the full game in all its glory.

And since I said I’d keep it brief, that’ll be all for now! Mr WigDev signing out! (Ack, still awful)

Rather than spam new posts for every minor update to my Miriam’s Mice Beta, I thought I’d collect them all here in one place. This list will probably only interest me, or the nosy, or anyone who wants an insight into the particular quirks of Unity/WebgL compatibility, but if you’re one of those curious people, don’t worry! I’ve edited it to avoid any major spoilers.

• v0.11 – Small delay to intro timing so that the title dropdown appears correctly (More technically: now waits one frame after game load before beginning intro Coroutine – a Unity/WebGL specific issue)
• v0.12 – Resized certain text that overflowed out of containers (a Unity/WebGL specific issue)
• v0.13 – Removed a debug level skip code (Whoops!)
• v0.20 – Fixed staggered mouse movement that made them pause at every intersection (More technically: in the main game loop Coroutine, altered every ‘yield return new WaitWhile(x)’ to check ‘if(x)’ once before yielding, to avoid delay frames – a Unity/WebGL specific issue)
• v0.21 – Set map scroll speed with arrow keys to be faster and constant (More technically: multiplies all scroll movement by time since last frame to account for WebGL-introduced lag)
• v0.22 – Reassigned various early-game character expression images to better suit their dialogue
• v0.23 – Fixed the appearance of key items in the Workshop so that they maintain their base colour while glowing
• v0.24 – Corrected the timing of mouse conversion during pellet deployment (I was rounding up instead of down, ugh)
• v0.25 – Adjusted mouse translation text display so that it doesn’t wobble with each new line (More technically: gave the Text component a fixed line spacing so that it doesn’t update due to variable letter heights as new words appear)
• v0.30 – Fixed major issue where key items in Workshop/Basement were sometimes unclickable (More technically: flipped objects by giving them negative scale rather than rotation through x/y axis, to keep their hitboxes parallel to the z-plane – a Unity/WebGL specific issue)
• v0.31 – Redesigned some puzzles (“Attraction and repulsion” & “The wildcat enclosure”) containing devices that may not have yet been unlocked, which allowed unintentional early access to later rooms
• v0.32 – Corrected bug that sometimes left extra mice in the room if pressing the stop button when mice were overlapping
• v0.33 – Fixed major issue where a story event was failing to trigger (Anyone who has completed the room “A solitary cell” before this update should re-complete it as they did initially to fix the problem)
• v0.34 – Allowed paper background to auto adjust to fit the variable sizing of handwritten fonts (a Unity/WebGL specific issue)
• v0.35 – Set various object rotation speeds to be faster and constant (More technically: multiplies all Quaternion rotations by time since last frame to account for WebGL-introduced lag)
• v0.36 – Fixed bug that sometimes left dialogue option buttons on screen (More technically: only sets button.interactable when both options have fully appeared)
• v0.40 – Overhauled certain one-off events so they will re-occur if ever interrupted by a webpage reload (More technically: delays all calls to SyncFiles() until the event is complete)
• v0.41 – Paused game events while progress gauges are filling
• v0.42 – Stopped the current mouse guide colour from switching unnecessarily when using Undo/Redo in a room
• v0.50 – Added a late-game mouse variant book and popups to help keep track of mice seen, as well as overhauling the related allegorical dialogue (Finally an addition, not just a bug-fix!)
• v0.51 – Another addition: a Colour-Blind Mode! (More details)
• v0.52 – Fixed certain in-room game events to only trigger if the room is successfully completed
• v0.53 – Flipped/Rotated a bunch of rooms (“Lost and found”, “Carefully timed consumption”, “Delayed start”, “Windows”, “Close quarters”, “‘Lactose’ intolerance?”, “Sofa party”, “The odd couple” & “Corner pellet”) to stop any chairs/sinks from facing the walls (Nitpicking, I know…)
• v0.54 – Altered image compression method to balance crisper graphics with reduced filesize for WebGL platform (More technically: RGBA Compressed DXT5, with larger base graphics and Crunch Compression, without Mipmaps due to the fixed WebGL game window resolution)
• v0.60 – Fixed a late-game room (“Bottleneck”) that had been inadvertently broken by a previous update (Yikes! So sorry to those of you who’d been aiming for 100% since then!)

Happy Christmas all! Despite everything, I hope everyone’s managed to get as much healthy enjoyment out of this year as they can? I’m personally looking forward to taking a break from everything for a few weeks – in which I will sleep for as long as humanly possible – but before that I figured it was only right to give you a progress report on Miriam’s Mice, my latest game in development.

I’d originally been hoping to get an alpha version uploaded for you all by now, but I recently came up with a great new idea for an extra feature in the game which I haven’t quite got working yet. So rather than give you a pitifully substandard version without this incredible feature, I’ll instead be waiting until sometime in the new year for the alpha release.

(Full disclosure: yes, as I’m sure you’ve all guessed, this great new feature is something minor and unnecessary that will probably only be fully enjoyed by one person: me. Totally worth it.)

In the meantime, it’s been far too long since I displayed the progress I’ve made since the very outdated demo I published earlier this year, so to whet your appetites, here’s a flood of screenshots. Given the limitations of the medium of screenshots, you’ll just have to imagine the cool animations and sounds that go with them…

As you can see, there are still a few graphics that need finalising – most obviously I haven’t yet created proper graphics for Miriam herself, but I also want unique closeups of the mice for dialogue popups, plus more decoration in the workshop and basement, and some significant tweaks to the UI… not to mention that everything else is subject to change depending upon my whims… (Okay, so I’m not quite at the alpha release stage, new feature or not!)

Still, the end is in sight! And I hope that becomes a more global refrain as we move into 2021. Take care all!

Hullo, puzzle fans!

I hope you’re all keeping well in these unusual times. For myself, lockdown and separation from some of my usual devices and workstations has led to me spending the last few months developing a new game, and I now have a limited early demo available!

Miriam’s Mice is a ‘simple’ game about chasing ‘mice’ into ‘holes’. And I don’t see how I could be more ‘forthcoming’ than that.

Since this game is still early in development, this demo currently has no sound and contains many placeholder graphics, but it is nevertheless already full of challenging puzzle content! Full marks to anyone who can clear all the rooms, even at this early stage!

Be sure to come back in a few months for the complete version of the game, featuring sounds and music, more intricate puzzles, upgraded graphics, and that classic looming WigDev sense that something isn’t quite right…