Game Hub 1.15.0, Stonehold 1.0.0 and Tower Defense 1.0.0: save a game, or start one with nothing
Game Hub can now put a game down and pick it up days later. A room and a saved
game are two different things and you are only ever in one of them: a room is a
run you are in the middle of, which survives a lost connection and now waits an
hour instead of five minutes before it is dropped, while a save is you
deliberately stopping — it is written to disk, it has no expiry, and it is used
up the moment you continue it. Pressing Play when you have one asks which you
meant, continuing or starting over, and a run you no longer want can be thrown
away outright instead of blocking the next one. Nothing about a save is recorded
in the leaderboards, because the game has not ended.
The hub does not know what is in a save. Every game decides what belongs in it,
so the same Save & exit works for a puzzle, a guessing game and a strategy game
without any of them knowing about the others. SudoFall keeps the grid, the score
and the sequence it was dropping. FindYourself saves on a round boundary — the
standings and the locations still to come are worth carrying, half a guess is
not — so a save made while a result is on screen picks up at the next round.
Stonehold is new, and it starts with nothing. The map is drawn, the clock is
stopped, and you choose where the keep goes: near the iron, far from a camp,
wherever the ground reads best. It is the one decision that cannot be taken
back. Four camps sit in the four corners, each its own colour, each playing the
same game you are — they gather, build, upgrade their keep and arm soldiers, and
because they build no towers and no walls, everything they earn walks at you.
Nothing caps any of it: no level limit on either side, no limit on their huts,
their barracks or the size of what they send, and a camp marches with its whole
standing army. There is no victory and no last level, only how long the hold
stood and what it scored.
They are not allies either. None of them goes looking for a rival, but nobody
walks through anybody, so two parties arriving from different corners fight it
out where they meet and only the survivors come on — which means where you
settled decides whose road crosses whose. Nothing in the hold is built to
gather: your people walk to the forest, the stone and the iron themselves, judge
what you are short of and pick their own patch. You never command anyone. You
set one priority — build, gather or arm — and a tower with no ammunition does
not fire, so the hold is only as strong as the people willing to carry across
it.
Tower Defense is released alongside it: one tower in the middle, waves closing
in from every side, and the tower choosing its own targets. It is published
early and knowingly unfinished, and it will grow from here.
Both new games need mvmOS 0.37.0-beta, which carries the shared game launcher
they open through.