Polymer Picker v1.12 published

You may well be thinking - why nothing on this game for months, then suddenly 3 posts all in the same day?!

I promise this will be the last (for today).

If anyone did watch YouTuber and fellow BBC Micro retrofan Colin Hoad's review of Polymer Picker, you may be aware of a silly bug he highlighted during later levels of the game, whereupon the shark ends up floating above the water, heading down towards you.

As I mentioned in a comment on his Discord, the only place sharks can do this is at the end of Steven Spielberg's movie Jaws. It certainly wasn't intended behaviour in the game.

I let the matter lie for a number of weeks, until I recently discovered a nasty bug in the Christmas edition of the game, when I happened to play test it. After a year online, I discovered the game crashed after the first play of the game.

I couldn't let the matter lie any longer - I not only fixed the memory crash issue in the Christmas edition, but also sorted out the shark bug, and ported this across to the standard version, along with some other minor adjustments (a higher top score to beat, and removal of my Twitter handle from the instructions).

v1.12 had been around as a Github PR, but I have taken the plunge to merge it, so it has now been formally published, alongside the Christmas edition.

I really hope that with the playtesting I performed in recent weeks, that the shark behaves itself now on later levels, and that the memory bug has not resurfaced. Memory on the BBC Micro is incredibly tight, I literally had a few bytes to spare between the top of the available space, and the start of screen memory. So I'm keeping my fingers firmly crossed!

I hope you enjoy playing both editions of the game. And Merry Christmas!