After many months of development Turtle Arena 0.5.0 is now available for download. There have been many improvements and new features. There is now four player splitscreen and many higher resolution graphics, among other things.

I am working on the future plans of removing the Ninja Turtles and adding new characters and a new story. I think the roadmap is going to change. I haven’t decided what the goals for the next minor and major release will be yet. Before I though I would continue making the “Ninja Turtle” game, but now I really want to move on. To create a new world, new characters, and new story. So this might be the last “major” release which has Ninja Turtles in it.

Four of the planned six characters for the “new Turtle Arena” (which hasn’t been named yet) have some specific ideas about animal species, abilities, and possible background story. I am still working on the other two. There is planned to be a turtle, rabbit, frog, and an undecided mammal for single player and multiplayer. Also planned is a snake in a robotic suit and an undecided mammal for multiplayer. More as it develops.

There has been 78 revision made to the svn since the last post.

– Cleaned up and improved the license documentation and such.

– Removed the music by Neil Crowe (The Mulletz). It is licensed as non-commercial, which is considered “non-free”. There is now only one music track (by zero-project) which is used for the whole game…

– Improved connect to server and start server loading screens.

– Cleaned up and improved PNG screenshot code.

– Levelshots can be saved as PNG and JPG now (instead of TGA).

– Removed some unused data from the pk3s.

– Fixed bots to attack breakable brushes when they are in the way. (Fixes issue of bots getting stuck in subway map.)

– A lot of fixes.