When you maintain a project, publishing new releases can quickly become a chore, so naturally one tries to automate it as much as possible.

One release step which is often automated is updating the changelog. We already have git commit messages, so let's gather all the messages since the last tag and "Voilà!" changelog entries for the new version!

There is however a problem with this idea:

Git commit messages and changelogs do not have the same target audience.

Introduction

Another super-late monthly update. I feel like I should start the next one tomorrow to get a chance to publish it on time :)

Pixel Wheels

Not much has happened in June on Pixel Wheels, I merged in updates for the Basque and Russian translations, and updated my French translation.

Beside this, I fixed the "Open log folder button does not work on Windows" bug, getting ready for Pixel Wheels 0.23.0 release (which has already happened at the time I am writing this, but it's for July report...)

Pixel Wheels 0.23.0 is out! This version brings quite a few goodies. Let's have a look at the main changes.

New track

First, the "Country Life" championship got a new track: "Flood". As its name implies, there is quite a lot of water in it!

I plan to add a new track for each new version of Pixel Wheels. 0.24.0 should add a new track to the "Square Mountains" championship.

New vehicle

This new version also features a new vehicle, the Miramar. It looks like this:

This car may look familiar to some of you :). Its name is a reference that nobody has found yet (as far as I know). Let me know if you have it!

Introduction

Last month I said I wanted to release Pixel Wheels 0.23.0, or at least make it "ready to release". The release did not happen, partly because May has been very hard for me on a personal level. Still, Pixel Wheels received some care and is mostly "ready to release".

pixelwheels

Vehicle selector improvements

I reworked the vehicle selector, giving it a lighter background to make the vehicles stand out more. This is a backport of part of the "big tires" work I started some time ago but which is shelved for now.

Introduction

This month I spent all my time on Pixel Wheels except for adding a small new feature to Git Bonsai.

Pixel Wheels

Pixel Wheels know speaks German

Christian Schrötter contributed a German translation for Pixel Wheels, growing the supported languages to 9. That's awesome, keep them coming!

Make championship, track and vehicle names translatable

Speaking of translations, championship, track and vehicle names are now translatable. This fixes bug #168. While translating these is not mandatory for latin-based languages, it is required for the game to look good in non-latin languages.

Introduction

March turned out to be more productive than February, turns out not going to hospital helps! (Who knew? 😄)

Pixel Wheels

Flood track

I merged in the first version of the Flood track, making the Country championship the first one to be composed of three tracks.

Introduction

This month was not as productive as I planned because real life got involved.

First, I had to go to the hospital for an appendicitis. The operation went well, this was not complicated or dangerous surgery, but the week of the operation was not the most productive ever 🤕.

Then, Scaleway decided the server hosting my backups was a bit too reliable, so they destroyed it during an incident 😡. I had to go host shopping (no way I was staying with them after that), re-upload backups, and revisit some IT choices I made. My new setup is not completely done, but it's mostly back up (ahah), and I like it better than the previous one, so there is that.

Thanks to Josu Igoa, Pixel Wheels has been translated to Basque.

It might not be the most widespread language, but I find it wonderful that people go out of their way to keep their language alive and relevant, so I am super happy with this new translation!

The translation has been merged in master: you can give it a try from the master builds.

Introduction

Writing games is a lot of fun, but it's even better when players can find your game, install it and play it.

This means it's part of the job to work on the game packaging and availability.

Pixel Wheels packaging and availability has improved over the years:

In version 0.16.0, Pixel Wheels got an itch.io page:

Since version 0.19.1, the game no longer requires installing a JRE: it ships as a standalone executable with a bundled, trimmed-down version of the JRE, thanks to Packr.

And now the latest version, 0.22.0, is available on Flathub 🎉!

This is great because it makes the game easier to discover, and it makes it simpler for players to update to the latest version.

Pixel Wheels

In January Pixel Wheels learned to speak Russian, thanks to Nickoriginal. I also fixed an annoying bug with the Rocket car: when hitting a thin wall at a certain angle, it was possible for a front wheel to go on one side of the wall and the body on the other side, resulting in the car getting stuck (#174).

With these latest changes in, I finally released Pixel Wheels 0.22.0 🎉.