useless and useful features update

an actual tutorial

the first few levels of the game kind of sucked as a tutorial -- there's not nearly enough space for the player to get an intuition for the movement controller, and the levels having to be fun* to speedrun harms their effectiveness for tutorialization. to fix this i've added a separate tutorial area that's much easier and more open than the first three levels of the game. i'm planning on adding more content of this type in the future (more open sections without as concrete objectives) because it's surprisingly fun to use spinny guy's controller in less "formal" contexts.

palettes

this one's fairly self-explanatory. currently there are 8 color palettes to choose from (including the usual one) as well as a secret option to create custom palettes. each of the 8 basic palettes currently unlocks with gold times, but once there's more content i might make the unlock conditions more varied.

credits

not very exciting. it's literally just another menu but with text instead of buttons. for some reason i set it to only unlock when you complete all of the main levels.

quicksave and quickload

not technically a "new" feature (it's been there undocumented for maybe the last month or so) but now it actaully works and it's shown in the assist menu. you can save the current state of a level and then reset the level back to that state at any time. useful for box roll and secrets (and box roll secrets).

other

• rotate 3 is about 4 times less bad, depending on how you measure it
• marginal improvements to game UI
• marginal improvements to game text
• fullscreen option
• hula hoop level isn't unlocked from the start. how did that happen in the first place
• approximately 30 commits worth of changes

next update

the next update is hopefully coming around may 9th (spinny game's 3rd anniversary). it'll add more levels, secret and bonus levels, and whatever features i end up implementing while making the update. i'm hoping to get the game to a state where i can consider it the "full game" (minus music) but that might be overly optimistic. stay tuned, i guess??

i also might post things about the development process or complaints about my favorite game engine on here or on my blog later, but i've been planning on doing that for the past like three months and haven't done anything of the sort so it's unlikely that i'll actually end up doing it