I was lucky enough to have one of my first review keys used by a person that goes by Dwaggienite on Twitch. He was very thorough about completing each level 100% on his first playthrough. It was super helpful to watch his stream as he found many pain points and frustrations. He may have even rang the bell of rage a few times. My game was a bit under cooked, but I've just done some baking and hopefully now it's just right, or at least a lot better.
Wall stick/pop mechanic
One of the core parts of the way player movement works in Nummels is that you can sprint and then squish into a wall, where you stick for a second before being able to pop off at high speed and get some crazy height. This can also get in the way more than it helps when you continuously stick to walls as you're trying to get around a level quickly. It could also maintain your speed when you weren't pressing anything on the controls, making you get stuck bouncing back and forth in narrow gaps.
Now when you stick to a wall and then don't press anything, you just fall straight down. No more bouncing backward. If you hold the opposite direction from the wall, you will pop horizontally without any vertical jumping. If you press jump without holding anything, or hold in the direction away from the wall and press jump, you'll do a big jump off the wall. If you press jump while holding into the direction of the wall, you'll jump straight up and can jump right over the wall you were sticking to. These changes make it so you don't feel like you're fighting against the wall jump as you're running around the level as fast as you can. I think it's a huge improvement.
Par time strictness
The par times were designed to be very challenging to do, and require planning and speed-running to hit. Since I had an achievement where you had to collect all the coins in the game, it made perfecting every level a requirement to do that. It was just too harsh, and more frustrating than it was challenging in most levels. So all par times have been increased by about 20%, and some more than that. There are leaderboards for the people who really want to go crazy with the speed-running.
Level revisions
There were a lot of levels that had some rough edges, and things like having spikes in places that were just mean and didn't add to the puzzle. I tried to address all the places I could find where it felt like something unfair could happen, where a Nummel could die in a weird way that wasn't always consistent. A few of the levels were unredeemable. Those were thrown in the trash and replaced with a new one. They knew who they were.
Here's a selection of before/after shots with the old on top and the new on bottom. About half of all the levels in the game got a touch up.
Death beam brutality
The death beam was just a bit too mean, and would shred Nummels when it looked like the beam was high enough to be over their heads while the player carried the box. I moved the collision up, so that Nummels at the same ground level as the player will be safe while the player is carrying the death beam. There were also issues with setting down the death beam and being instantly vaporized by it. I decided to make it so if the death beam is on the ground, the player can walk through it without getting killed by it.
Nummel bomb grabbiness
If a bomb is armed, the Nummels will no longer pick it up. They'll still pick up and start the timer on an unarmed bomb, though.
Coin collector achievement
I changed the achievement from requiring the player to get every coin in the game, to only needing to get 1000 coins. There are 1647 coins total, and getting 1000 still requires you to do reasonably well throughout the game, but you don't have to be near perfect.
And the rest
There were a bunch of small changes in the update as well, like changing the visuals for the green button that starts the level (so it doesn't look like you need to jump on it), and being able to interact with the green button without dropping what you're carrying. I also made it so if you drop something on the same position as another thing, you don't instantly pick up the other thing. There was a lot of unintended grabbing going on with that.
I think the game feels miles better than it did before this update, and I feel very lucky to have given a key to Dwaggienite who was stubborn enough to keep playing even though there were many issues that made the game not fun.
The full release is coming to Steam on June 21st, I'm looking forward to having more people play it!
