Greetings, Hard Chip players!

The last post was two weeks ago! Even if I aim to maintain a steady pace of one weekly release, sometimes I miss doing a blog post about it. 3 "soft" releases have been published: 3.12, 3.13, 3.14 without a post.

The primary reason is playtest sessions.  Numerous modifications have been made following four sessions. This is very instructive, and the feedback is precise and actionable. But the process was kind of all over the place (which can be good), and the post was out the window, oops.

1. New Challenge and updating existing one: An easy challenge to expose the mechanics of loaded states has been added.

2. Simplified UI in challenges: to ease the learning curve, everything that wasn't needed in a specific challenge was removed.

In this challenge, you only have to place traces between the input and the output. So it shows what you need for that.  Each UI element will be unlocked following a progression throughout the challenges.

3. New Lines connecting readouts-die: to help understand what is what, each challenge's readout shows a line to the block they control/observe.

4. Story mode is back! Previously, the story and the challenge modes were separated. It didn't matter; all players did the Story Mode anyway. So, the Story mode is the only mode, and all challenges are now in it.


5. UI with chromatic aberration and curvature post-processing: this is tentative to differentiate the UI from the very recognizable Imgui UI look and feel.

 QOL, Bug, and Crash fixes:
1. Instruction for PMOS and NMOS has been revisited.
2. Score report graphs are bucketed by 15 instead of 50
3. Challenge Editor is in the making! Right now, it is for dev purposes, but it will evolve for the players to play with.
4. Some challenges files are now in compressed form (50Mb becoming 0.5Mb compressed)
5. The "Validate" button shows the status of the challenge: "Validating," "Unresponsive," and "Validated!"
6. Validation stops when the player changes blocks and/or inputs value.
7. Copy/past mode deactivable, and switch to select mode by default.
8. "Spacebar" now recenter the camera at a default position
9. Minimized version challenge's readout UI element.
10. Changing the terms "Up" and "Down" with the terms "1" and "0". Easy to read and understand for players.
11. Cleaner UI for instruction windows.
12. New kinds of music! Trying to change the atmosphere to something less cyberpunk.
13. Simulation fix when players cut traces, states could stop propagating. Simulation fix on puller winning against terminals behind a transistor.
14. Auto expand the die when pasting a blue print larger than the actual die.
15. Terminal sounds in Story mode tune down a bit.

As always, your feedback/suggestions/comments are instrumental in making this game.

Thank you for playing Hard Chip, and stay tuned for more updates and new features!