Turtle Arena 0.6 is planned to be released by the end of the month! That give just two weeks to finish it!

Some major changes have been held back until the 0.8 release, mainly the new title and characters. I decided it would be best to have a new stable release now instead of having a release with rushed half-baked characters in a couple months.

Part of the decision for a new stable release now is that Turtle Arena is going to be included in Mageia 2 which is scheduled for release in May! (The current Turtle Arena version to be included in 0.5.3, hopefully 0.6 will be completed in time for inclusion.)

What’s left to do for 0.6?

I’ve recently started working a new character select menu. It will be used for selecting players/characters for main game, arcade, and multiplayer. It will make it much easier to play splitscreen games. It will also be used in-game for easily adding/dropping players and changing characters.

I still need to finish the Arcade Mode start game menu and end of game menu. Arcade mode saves scores, which I still need to show in the Arcade menu. I still need to finish the end of game UI so players can enter their name (instead of always using player 1’s multiplayer name).

I recently noticed BSPC does not compile. It is used for creating the bot map AI .aas files. There are pre-compiled binaries in subversion, but I can’t in good conscious do a release with it failing to compile.

I’m sure other things will pop up, but these are the main goals right now. I’d like to spend some time working on the multiplayer maps, but we’ll see if there is time.