Hey Spinners, hope you're well,
An update!
Mobile development is rolling along. We've had to dramatically restructure our Unity project to include both the mobile and XD versions in one project. It's a bit of a nightmare, but it's preferable to working on separate projects and manually bringing shared assets across.
Level designer Dave has not been required as much on mobile, so he's been busy charting some new free tunes which you can find on our official Spotify playlist. Since mobile dev started, we've licensed and charted a few new tunes which we will release as free levels once we are able to ship XD updates again (after the mobile version is released).
New licenses!
We've licensed a Camellia track! Check out Body F10ating in the Zero Gravity Space. Many of you have been requesting Camellia for a while, and I'm sure it will provide a crazy challenge in SRXD.
We have also licensed another Haywyre track, Let Me Hear That. We're using the live version you can hear on YouTube. It's got a few small differences from the official release we think will make a more interesting level design (this chart is already completed).
We've also finished charting Heading East by Farfetch'd - one of our older licenses, and definitely one for our Glitch lovers.
So that's minimum 3 free tracks next update!
DLC reveal!
We'd also live to reveal our first DLC pack - a collaboration with Chillhop Music!
We met David from Chillhop at PAX East earlier this year. He turned up at our booth wanting to hang and jam with the game. We quickly forced him to take the idea of a Chillhop DLC back to his team, and we're glad he did.
The guys at Chillhop curated 10 incredibly cool, relaxing tunes to help you chill, study and relax to (and PFC). Check them out on the official SRXD x Chillhop Spotify list or by clicking the image below. We also have been loving their incredible merch - we have been living in our Chillhop hoodies all winter.
This pack will be $11.99USD for 10 tracks (with appropriate regional pricing).
Even though we're announcing this now, we want to wait until after 1.0 to release DLC. We don't believe it's a good look to release paid DLC in Early Access.
Having said that, the charts are done, and will be super easy to ship after 1.0 once we get some sweet backgrounds in there.
We want this pack to be on the easy - medium side of the difficulty curve, and a great place to go if you're looking to move up a difficulty and want a more chill experience.
Other things
We are also busy polishing every single level in the game. As the game has been released and we've seen a ton of custom charts produced by our incredible community (check out the #customs-showcase channel in our Discord channel). The ideas - of what works, what's fun, what's clean, what's difficult - have evolved over the year the game has been released, so we're taking the time to polish the official charts. This includes:
- Polishing out of time notes (are still quite a few!)
- Removing center taps before spins for extra readability
- Adding slightly more variety with scratch zones (especially in easier difficulties)
- Removing excessive lift off notes, and placing some where they fit more nicely (we went a bit wild when we first added them, especially in Hard where the element is meant to be only introduced).
- Remove excessive wheel "drift" (when note patterns force the wheel to move repeatedly in one direction, causing problems for players who don't use click to move, or those with smaller mouse pads)
- Ironing out difficulty spikes
We are also going to extend all of the easy and some of the normal difficulty levels in length. One of the main complaints with SRXD (and reasons for negative reviews / refunds) is that it is too difficult for new players. We hope that by extending the easier difficulties, we can provide casual players and those new to rhythm games with a more comprehensive experience, without feeling like they're being pushed to the harder difficulties.
This will mean that on average Easy levels will be the same length as Normal levels (2-3 minutes). We've already done this with the Chillhop levels, so we know it works well.
As always, take care and keep spinnin'.