Gold Master
Your Blinks arrived this holiday season with this FW on board. It has all of the same functionality as previous releases, plus a feature we haven't used yet for a game in this release, but are excited to use for games in future releases.
Startup State
The new feature is the ability to know whether you (the Blink) are responsible for seeding the game that we are all currently playing. From the onset, we wanted Blinks games to typically rely on distributed logic rather than a master/slave paradigm. This speaks to our values in addition to being technically more interesting. However, there are plenty of great reasons to want to be able to differentiate Blinks. We already provided access to the 8-byte UID that is on each Blink (not yet used for shipping games), and now one can use the Blink that is seeding the game to identify itself for any reason you can think of. Here a couple of reasons you might want to use this feature:
- Your game has different roles, the piece seeding the game might be a boss of sorts and so it can start in its correct role (Flic Flop could use this...)
- Your game sets up uniquely for different numbers of Blinks (i.e. the starting tile can take charge of counting and then reporting)
- Your game piece is responsible for scorekeeping or high scores... could be helpful to know that this tile is responsible for this game
Not sure of all of the reasons, but felt like a powerful tool to include, and if we didn't get it into the BIOS, it would have been more difficult to release games in the future that utilize this feature.
Fine Tuning
There are a bunch of items that have been tweaked and tuned and may continue to be tuned as we learn how people play best, but the short list here simply included proper coding of the battery warning (which is really set to only show terribly depleted batteries, you will notice that green most likely disappears before you get a warning), and the timing of the seed game mode lasts longer so you can read instructions and not miss the window for Blinks programming.
Enjoy these updates, next release will most likely be Examples cleanup, if you'd like to contribute to the examples, reach our at hello-devs@move38.com