Today, Trombone Champ has been updated to 1.27E! Mainly, this update adds support for 21:9 ultrawide resolutions, but it tweaks some other stuff as well...
Note: mod compatibility
As usual, we've had this update available as a beta for a few weeks so that the community can get a head start on updating their stuff. However, this update adjusts the GUI in almost every screen, so it's more likely to break mods than previous ones. If you rely on mods that are broken by this update, you can load the previous version of the game by right-clicking the game in Steam, going to Properties, choosing Betas, and then choosing the "last_update" beta branch. But please hop on the newest version as soon as you can!
Ultrawide!
Firstly, We've added support for 21:9 resolutions! This was more work than you might think because most of Trombone Champ's user interface is made of tons of 2D artwork that was arranged to fit a 16:9 window. If you widened the screen before this update, there was usually nothing at all in the extra space to the left and right!
During gameplay, backgrounds are currently letterboxed to the middle of the screen. In the future, we might add options to stretch or zoom the backgrounds (although it will look bad). But there are lots of other tweaks: the GUI fits nicely into the corners, the tromboner is shifted to the right, etc.
As we adjusted the GUI for 21:9, we usually ended up breaking the 16:10 display. So, when we were done with 21:9, we went through the screens a second time to make 16:10 work again. In a lot of cases, 16:10 should actually look a bit nicer than it did previously!
Do we plan to support 32:9? Probably not, sorry! We'd need to add a ton of artwork to each scene in order to fill the screen, which is a lot of overhead to benefit a very very small number of players.
Custom Track Errors!
The game now displays error messages if custom tracks fail to load. If you have any problems with custom tracks — such as duplicate tracks, tracks that are missing required files, etc — this should help you troubleshoot them!
(Ideally you shouldn't have any errors at all. But now that Steam Workshop is online, it's definitely easier to bump into some of these problems...)
If any of your custom tracks can't be loaded, error messages should appear as soon as the game starts. You can also review these errors in Settings -> Customs.
More stuff!
There are a handful of other tweaks and improvements in this version:
- Some storyline cinematics have been tweaked to make stuff look better & to make the sequence of events easier to follow.
- The mute button in the Track Select screen has been expanded to provide additional Amazing Muting Options.
- Default track collection has been changed to "All" for users with custom tracks (only if the user has never clicked the track collection button).
- Added support for difficulties over 10 (although we don't recommend giving tracks difficulties over 10).
- The game now prevents tracks with duplicate "track tags" from being loaded.
- When packaging a custom track in the Tootmaker, the game now checks to see if the track tag is a duplicate and throws an error message if it is.
- Bugfix: fixed issue where the Help & View Waveform buttons were hidden in Tootmaker.
What's Next for Trombone Champ in 2025
We've starting working on our next game (unannounced), but we have more Trombone Champ stuff in the pipeline. In addition to a handful of new tracks we plan to release later this year, our biggest priorities at the moment are patching the Nintendo Switch version and improving controller support on the Steam version so the game plays better on Steam Deck.
Here's where we are:
We hope you enjoy this update... Stay tuned for more!
Forever in your service,
Holy Wow Studios