Just some minor startup improvements.

• Improved actual startup time by making some things run in parallel that were previously serial.
• Improved apparent startup time by transitioning from the splash screen to a loading screen sooner.

The game renderer has been massively overhauled, directly leading to the following:

• New animations for playing pieces for Drop Four and Gomoku.
• New winline drawing animation.
• Scrubbing backwards through history now animated.
• New piece option: filled triangle.
• Saved games no longer use pre-generated images.

The Easy AI and Hard AI now work with Drop Four. Apparently they were previously getting confused.

• The game is now simulated on the game setup screen, to give an indicator of each player’s chance of winning.
• A new option in settings to control whether game simulation happens in the cloud or not.
• A new option in settings to control whether any cloud features are used.
• Settings layout cleaned up.

• Added AI difficulty options.
• Improved how players’ default names are handled.
• Made lists of buttons wrap more nicely.
• Fixed a bug which prevented the AI from realising it was playing Chain.

• A new game variation option I decided to call “chain”. Get an extra turn after completing a line.
• See what the AI is thinking (when not running in the cloud). This has existed in some form for debugging, but I cleaned it up enough for the public.

An apparently minor release with lots of changes under the hood, including:

• Fixed a bunch of layout issues on smaller devices.
• Fixed the very odd text of the analytics collection warning.
• Simplified the implementation of some of the layouts to improve performance

Analytics are now disabled by default and a message briefly explaining why the app would like to collect analytics is now displayed at startup.

Fixed a minor issue that caused a crash introduced in 0.6.

0.6 brings a brand new game mode, Drop Four (also known as Connect Four, Captain’s Mistress, Four Up, Plot Four, Find Four, Four in a Row, Four in a Line and Gravitrips). I’ll add more information about this in a game design post. Other features include:

• Browsable release notes in app, that include links to the blog.
• Back and forward buttons in the game history.
• In game action buttons now use icons.
• Previous move highlight now fills the square.