It´s been a long road, getting from there to here.... it´s been a long time, but my time is finally near...
This Thursday (6th August) we will be launching Making it Home into Early Access and I just pushed the build you'll download on Thursday to Steam. Many of you helped out as part of the closed beta which ended at the end of May (which feels like 10 years ago). I wanted to put together some patch notes to let you know what has been added and what has changed. If you didn't take part in the beta then this is to help give you an idea of what to expect if you decide to join our community for Early Access. There is quite a lot so rather than explain everything in detail I'll drop in the odd gif or screenshot to wet your appetite for Thursday! ...I also want to let you discover the new objectives and panels on your own in the game.
New Locations, Music, Characters and Story!
New Objectives
- Honey Jar Objective - Collect honey from bee hives and try and get it into your workshop.
- Cherry Bomb Objective - Try and push these off your vehicle before they explode.
- Another Race - This time you're racing someone in a vehicle...
New Panels
- Boulders - To help you start building Rube Goldberg machines
- Pea Shooter - All I'm going to say is "peas and carrots"
- Water wheel - Another way to generate electricity...
Challenge Mode Revamp
- Challenge modes are now associated with the panels you find in different acts. There are currently 6 in the game, a weekly, daily and monthly for each act. All with leader-boards for average and max speed.
- A sandbox challenge mode where you have all panels available is unlocked by competing in the standard challenges.
General Improvements
- Added flying text to thrust panels which tell you exactly how much thrust they are creating at any given time.
- Changed a number of sky boxes in Act 1.
- Reduced jump height to reduce how often player head butts the ceiling.
- Added a one second re-spawn delay after you fall off your vehicle. Players were often running straight off the back of the vehicle after re-spawning.
- Added arrows to map screen and changed colours of location buttons to make things clearer.
- You can now manually dismiss the tutorial window.
- If unlocking a blueprint would automatically unlock another this is communicated when you have to decide which to unlock.
- You can now customise the colour of your vehicle's walls.
- The bite radius is larger making it easier to eat carrots around turbines.
- Added a number of particle effects for impacts.
- Implemented steam stats and achievements.
- Complete refresh of panel sprites - during the beta we made the walls bigger which covered part of the sprite so we needed to edit them all.
- Implemented jump caching which means if you hit jump a few frames too early the game still registers it.
- Added a destruction effect to panels when they get destroyed.
- Added more sounds when objects collide with each other.
- Added a visual effect when you collect an item.
- Added a glass window to the back of each open panel to help reduce the visual noise in the game.
- Game now pauses when steam overlay is opened during the leg.
- Implemented steam cloud saving!
- Disabled buttons are easier to read.
- We no longer highlight options when you have dialogue choices (some players were always picking those options).
- Added bridge icons to the progress bar so you know when to expect them.
- Increased max zoom level of the camera in blueprint mode, and increased mouse sensitivity.
- Added milestones to complete for each act (which relate to achievements)
- Race wins are now measured from the front of the vehicle.
- Fixed some typos in Act 1 story.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed bug when detecting if there is enough water left in a tank, which meant the steam engine could sometimes run on zero water.
- Fixed bug where replacing a panel using the workshop in leg always ended up with no walls.
- Sometimes Ellen would stop racing the player (she would rest but not start racing again) this bug has been fixed.
- A few edge cases which resulted in the occasional super jump have been fixed.
- Sometimes the tutorial window would never leave, that bug has been fixed.
- Sometimes dialogue choices did not detect the mouse click, this has been fixed.
- Balloons would sometimes fall off, they shouldn't now!!
- The camera now resets correctly when you re spawn.