What's New?

• New event areas/rooms.
  Since a large part of ICED is exploration, I wanted there to be more interesting areas to find. The added areas are not necessary to "escape," but they are still interesting and some provide safe zones from the darkness.

• Improved Generator
  ICED is procedurally generated, which means that every time you start a new game, the layout changes. While this makes the game creepy (you never know exactly what to expect) and adds to replayability, it also means that if the generation algorithm isn't very smart, the pacing of the map will be off and the game might feel like random exploration instead of interesting exploration (this was one of the lessons I learned from Deity Quest). The balance between being lost and confused and stumbling upon interesting clues and items is a fine one, and so the generator has to be as finely tuned to make sure it plays smoothly. The old generator was sometimes adding long "empty" corridors between interesting event areas, causing the pacing to be off. I re-wrote the room placement algorithm of the generation code to pack things in better, and now there are only long corridors where we want them!

• Save/Load
  While each playthrough isn't particularly long, it's long enough that people may want to save and quit, then return to the game later. I recently added a save/load feature (which turned out to be more complex than I expected because of all the concurrent events/animation/state that needed to be saved). However, like in many rouge-likes, loading the save will delete it, so you won't be able to load an old save when you die *evil laugh*. I am considering adding an "easy" mode where you can save/load at any time and perhaps adding a map that shows areas you've already explored, but the "true" experience will certainly not have that :P.

What's Next?