Petal Crash Online 1.1.1 is finally out, and it includes a bunch of fixes, and we finally delivered on releasing the server software (which was waiting on getting 1.1.1 tested). Some of the remaining issues included weird softlocks, and one of the major features introduced in the previous version was pretty blatantly broken, so I didn't want to just leave it like that forever. There are still things I know don't work correctly, but it's a result of design flaws, and redesigning things this late into the project seemed risky!! I don't want to have to do a 1.1.2 because I redesigned something and messed up haha.

This means I can finally consider the whole project complete and move on! In the end I learned a lot from developing PCO and I'm glad it managed to work as well as it did for something that's a very obvious first attempt at an online puzzle game, and I can carry all of that into whenever I inevitably do another online game like this.

In the future (probably after Petal Crash 2 gets online play) we're going to released the source code for the PCO client. I really want PCO to be a fully open source project. This will be a good contrast against the usual case with competitive video games, where a company wants it to be a sport, yet wants to have a ton of control over how people play it, which isn't very sport-like.

Also, thanks to Raspberryfloof and Kaito for lots of testing help with the final version! A lot of the bugs fixed here are things they found, and they helped with the very large task of making sure the "your board on right" feature fully worked.

https://galaxytrail.itch.io/petal-crash-online/devlog/795738/petal-crash-online-v111-and-server-software-now-available