hello everyone! today i'd like to take a moment of your time to talk about Labyrinths II. it's out. yeah, right now! you can actually play it, and enjoy it?! wowie, a new Lg products game! no, it did not take an actual two months to make, three of those weeks were spent doing literally anything else. i wish my school classes didn't suck so much, probably could've gotten the game out a lot earlier. whatever, it's here now. and it's infinitely better than its sloppily-made older brother.
it's poor planning on my part that i decided to make a new game during the busiest part of the year, but school is painfully boring. plus, working on this game kept me up in class a few times. Labyrinths II is more polished, fun, and better-looking than The Lost Labyrinths- i can't stress that enough. content-wise, TLL still wins by a long shot. at least it isn't painfully difficult to level up anymore, which was a common complaint among players.

i won't beat around the bush. if you want to play the game, do it now! if you'd like to stick around and read about how the game was made and why i wasted so much time not making it, feel free to continue from here. i'm proud of the first alpha, but there's still a heap of stuff left to be done. but hey, it's finally out, isn't it?

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the game has quite a few features not seen in the original. actual labyrinths, decent potions, beautiful CSS, just to name a few. the core gameplay revolves around labyrinths, rather than tediously building up towards them. the last TLL build was also horribly unfinished, and full of bugs and promises that just... weren't there. not to mention, the art was mediocre at best and repulsive at worst. it was a fun project at the time, but could NOT compare to games like Waves or the shelved Forez's Dream 2. (yes they're both by the same guy)
how does Lab 2 work around these problems? by shooting a bullet right through them, of course! this first alpha has everything it promised. all three labyrinths, all 14 deals, all that good stuff. there's still a lot of stuff i'd like to add in the future, such as new items and mechanics. art-wise, my good friend hyphen asked if he could make it on a whim (similar to most of our collabs). it came out really good, and fits the game quite well in my opinion.

my last IGM game was a somewhat simple clicker game, so it feels good to be returning to my usual style. making a new turn-based fighting game has been a blast, and i'm excited to hear your feedback. i'm not great when it comes to playtesting, and that's where you guys come in! if you play for 15 minutes during the first alpha, you'll receive a special medal as thanks! hope you enjoy this small taste of my final vision- it's the most effort i've put into a project for a while now. about 20% of the game was made during freetime in school, which is a neat fact, i guess. dunno if i could keep it up next year, but that's a story for another day.

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i'd also like to talk about the development of the game, since it's also fairly interesting. the pre-alpha was created just before april, and had quite a few differences from alpha 1. there were no icons, no third labyrinth, no deals, etc. it was a pre-alpha, alright. i have this version saved in my projects folder, so i'll always remember what the first iteration of the game looked like. while not technically being "public", you could actually play the pre-alpha all this time by using the exact same link. not sure if anybody did play it, but i probably wouldn't have minded. you could actually play Fire Forge right now if you'd like, but that game doesn't have a cool, hidden alpha build.

i kept most of the core mechanics from TLL, such as fishing and mining. fishing got some cool buffs and particle effects, but mining is the real star out of the two. instead of mines being limited to a singular ore, they're more spread out and contain a variety of ores that can appear. bombs were planned to come back and be usable for mining, but then i remembered how useless they were in TLL. plus, they felt like bloat more than anything.
the battle system was kept mostly the same. however, it takes place entirely in labyrinths, which are dungeons containing lots of loot, monsters, and other odd stuff. potions were made a lot easier to make and given better perks, and they're a lot more accessible than before. monsters can also have addons, which are unique abilities that are given once in a while. they could slow down your spells, regenerate hp, steal your money, or just have cracked stats. they're a fun way to shake up a battle, and one of the few finished things present in the pre-alpha build.

so those are all the core features at the moment. you can find anything else i missed by playing the game itself. there's a decent bit of stuff to explore, and i'm curious to see if it's all balanced well. that's all i have relating to Labyrinths II, but something else happened that i feel is worth talking about while we're here.

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i switched to linux. and not just any linux- i switched to the big one. one of the most feared, daunting, and hard-to-install distributions there is... Arch Linux. warning: nerdy bullsh*t incoming. anyways, in a stunning turn of events, turns out windows is not very good. with windows 10, the last "usable" version, ending support in october, i decided to waste even more of my precious time and install linux. originally, i planned to do this after support ended, but i got more and more curious after watching a multitude of videos about the distro.
so instead of using the handy-dandy install guide, i watched a 6-month-old tutorial instead. it's probably not recommended to use a video instead of the up-to-date guide, but my experience was fairly smooth. the worst part was the BIOS menu, which was janky and kinda scary to navigate. every button and menu felt like it could absolutely destroy the motherboard or wipe all my data.
after that headache of a menu, i entered Arch Linux. well, the virtual console part of it. you see, there's no "installation wizard" or anything of the sort- it's entirely terminal-based. the video used actual commands instead of archinstall, which made things a lot harder. thankfully, the video was thorough and took its time. i did have to use my Wii U's flash drive for the installation medium, and i'm still using it to store snapshots of my system. it's highly recommended you do this, since things can go wrong extremely easily.

after i got everything set up, i had two options for a user interface: KDE Plasma or Hyprland. while plasma is a similar desktop environment to windows, hyprland is where things get iffy. i know no one reading this has any idea what i'm talking about, but i don't care. hyprland is what's called a "tiling window manager". instead of floating, resizable windows that can move all over the screen, a tiling window manager locks windows into the middle of the screen. when another window is opened, it moves and reorganizes them in tiles so that no overlapping ever occurs. both have their pros and cons, but this was easily the hardest thing to choose.

i had a pretty hard time choosing which to use. hyprland has some neat customization and is great for productivity, but plasma is more familiar, compatible, and slightly less jank. i went back and forth around five times for a few days straight, but settled on plasma in the end. tiling window managers are cool, but you can't beat some sick-looking spotify and weather widgets.
i've been an arch user (btw) for about a week now, and it's been a decent experience. no more spyware and bloat, just a whole lot of freedom. i should also mention that i dual booted windows and linux, which means that i have both operating systems on the same hard drive. if i didn't do this, George 1.5 wouldn't exist anymore, and we wouldn't want that, would we?

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sorry for inserting a rather-unfitting segment into a Labyrinths II devlog, but my next blog post is kinda reserved for a different topic. with that out of the way, see you in two weeks!

^{half my steam games no longer work, this is truly devastating}