New Entanglement Maps and Free Trial!

Over the last few months we've been slowly making additions to Entanglement. Some of these have trickled out over time (e.g. saved games), but this week we finally released the flood. These additions include new levels, a free trial so you can check out the new levels before buying them, and a variety of bug fixes and interface improvements.

New Levels

This update adds eight new maps to Entanglement. Putting the total number of maps at twelve! These maps are split between two new expansion sets.

The Classic Mode Expansion offers four new maps that follow the classic Entanglement rule set. The maps look pretty simple, but you'll be surprised how the shape of each map changes your strategy.

The Tranquil Garden Expansion includes four new maps that challenge players to score as many points as possible with a limited number of tiles. Passing through sakura trees will earn you more tiles. This game mode was introduced in the Sakura Grove Expansion, but here we've explored it further with some great results!

We've also added a Combo Pack Expansion for users who want to get all twelve maps for the cheapest price possible.

In addition to the new packs, we've renamed the Sakura Grove Expansion to Expansion Sampler. Though it has a new name, it offers the same three maps with both types of gameplay.

Free Trial

For players who enjoy the game, but want to try the new maps  before they buy them, we've added a FREE one-day trial. When you start the trial you'll have access to all the maps in the game for one day.

The trial can be activated from the in-game market, accessible from the main menu under 'More Maps' or from the in-game menu on the 'Get More' tab under 'Get More Maps'. Once you're in the market just log in and select the 'Try It!' button to start your trial!

If any of these additions sound interesting, try them out here!

Saving Your Entanglement Progress

Earlier today we rolled out a new Entanglement build that includes a few new features. We'll announce the bigger additions next week (or just check out the game to see the new content), but I wanted to go ahead and note one simple addition that I think makes the game experience a bit more fluid: we auto-save your game!

I know this is not revolutionary, but, in addition to the end result, I think the implementation is cool. To accomplish this, we use the Local Storage capability of modern HTML5 browsers to store a player's moves as they are made. If the browser window is closed and opened at a later time, the same set of tiles is loaded and the game replays the stored moves to return the player's progress to its earlier state. This is especially useful for mobile devices, where interrupting a browser session is a commonplace event. Now players are able to play a few tiles at a time and still finish their game without losing their progress if they're interrupted.

The cool part? Replays. By storing a particular game's seed, we are able to re-generate the exact tiles that were used the first time the game was played. Then, the game simply swaps, rotates, and places tiles exactly as they were initially played. Once the list of moves has been replayed, the game is sitting in the exact layout it was when the player left.

Using the same logic the game can replay high score games as well... ...but that's not quite ready yet. Essentially, we do not have all the necessary information from earlier games to be able to generate and replay all of them accurately. However, we did run a replay on Fast Shocking Toucan's 5195, and it's... ...beautiful!