Hello everyone!
One year ago today, my brother Adam and I launched Crow Country here on Steam, and we were blown away by the response! We've been a 2-person company for nearly 13 years now, and have been making games together for over 20 years, but this has been our most successful year by far. So many people playing, sharing, streaming, recommending and reviewing the game, all around the world, has given us a huge boost of energy to take into our next games, so: thank you.
OK, on to the good stuff! One of the pieces of feedback we've received, here on Steam and elsewhere, is that the keyboard controls for Crow Country aren't as good as they could be. So I've been working to bring them up to the level of the gamepad controls (still our recommended way to play for now!).
That starts with a new default layout, which we've labelled CLASSIC in the settings. We took a good hard look at what other survival horror games do with their keyboard layouts, listened to comments about what's off about our old layout, and come up with something that I think should feel a lot better out of the box for new players.
Next we have a layout we've labelled MOUSE. This combines keyboard for movement/aiming and some actions, with mouse to rotate the camera, plus confirm/cancel and shoot/reload mapped to the mouse clicks (plus grenades on the wheel click, or E). Mouse support has been another requested feature, and this layout is similar to some of the Resident Evil HD layouts, so hopefully folks will find it useful.
Lastly, if you want, you can return to the old layout, now labelled ORIGINAL. Maybe you got really attached to it? Well, it's there for those who want it.
All three of these layouts can be selected in the Controls Settings menu from the title screen or pause menu. When using keyboard, you'll see the last two settings switch to keyboard-specific ones. You'll see we also added an option to use modern movement (rather than tank controls) on the keyboard - another requested feature.
One last (very minor) improvement is that if you have a controller plugged in, but start using the keyboard, you'll get keyboard controls shown. Previously controllers took priority over keyboard, now it just checks whatever you pressed last.
The requested keyboard feature we haven't finished yet is full key rebinding. With the way the game is built, it's a lot more work than we'd thought, but this update lays a lot of important groundwork to make things easier. I hope we can get it fully working soon!
A non-keyboard related update for this release - we've returned to compiling with mono rather than il2cpp. Thile il2cpp can result in slightly faster code execution, it doesn't have the mod and speedrunning tool support that mono does. So back we go! Sorry to the Crow Country speedrunning discord for having broken the autosplit for a while now, hopefully you can all enjoy running this up to date version at last.
That's it from me. Thanks again, until next time!
Tom-
