Mini-Dead: Tarot - March Progress Report
Mini-Dead Patch Notes — March 26, 2022
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
Hi everyone,
It's been a long time and I don't update you frequently enough. I'm very active over on the Milo Games discord server which you can join with the link below:
https://discord.gg/3RvHuvh
Release Date
It's looking very likely it'll be this year. I can't give a month yet, but progress is steady enough that it should be sometime in 2022.
My personal life is very busy so working on the game is not a regular thing. However, I've not given up on it since it's conception in 2016 so I won't stop now.
What's left to be done?
Three bosses are fully playable. The secret boss has turned into something far, far more ambitious than I anticipated. It has taken, by far, the most time out of any individual thing so far. It's the most complex and asset heavy boss fight I've ever done across Mini-Dead and Dead.
Once the secret boss is complete the game will then be the minimum viable product. Meaning you could fight the bosses and complete the game.
After that, all that's left is sound, polish, menus and bug testing which doesn't take very long at all.
60 FPS mode is gone
In order to release the game I have had to remove a quality of life feature. When Tarot is released, the 60 fps option will be removed. It's always been a confusing option, so let me clarify what it is and why it's going.
The game is made in Game Maker, which ties the time to the frame rate. Mini-Dead runs at 144fps but if your PC can only run it at 60fps the game essentially runs in slow motion.
To compensate, I put in a feature that doubled the speed of the game. If you chose to run the game 60fps, it would half the frame-rate but double the game creating the same experience.
This takes far too much time to implement so I'm scrapping the feature. Now, if your PC can't handle the frame rate, it will run in slow motion. This is the only way I can release the game and keep my sanity at the same time.
To caveat this, the game runs on some sort of special DLL that does something fancy with the time. It might help, it might not. Mini-Dead is a very light game though so I imagine most PCs will handle it.
If you want to ask me questions or see the crazy theories people have about the lore of these games then join the discord: https://discord.gg/3RvHuvh
~ Alec