A NEW UPDATE HAS LANDED!
It's time for a new update to save the day!
Now...this one isn't huuuuuuge, so don't expect a bunch of new content, it's mostly some quality of life changes, but also an updated character model which isn't as easy as you'd think.
Why wasn't it easy? Well, the game has about 40 animations in use, and the old character model was exported out of Blender in a weird way so the scaling caused issues with physics and a bunch of other things I was constantly fighting to work around.
I decided to finally re-rig the character model with the correct scaling, but sadly, there is no way to salvage the animations, so I had to re-do them all.
This took me a little while but I got there in the end!
There's still some tweaks here and there to smooth animations out, for example you will notice while jumping, the character kind of snaps their head forward at the start of the jump and it can really make the movement feel a bit janky.
I did a bunch of other fixes, mostly to do with the user experience, and quality of life stuff, but here's a list:
- Fixed not being able to hold B to go back to main menu in an online game as the host.
- Fixed not being able to go back out of the game mode selection to the lobby as the host in online play.
- Fixed Keyboard players respawning, then only having the ability to move up and right, now you are FREE!
- Fixed Keyboard players not being able to move at all on mini-game start.
- Updated character model to include hands with 3 little fingers, mainly so they can do the metal horns.
- Updated character to have feet with toes because why not?
- Updated physics on character now that the scaling is correct.
- Added capes, because capes are awesome. Capes reflect player colour.
- Added 2 new heads, the roman general helmet head and a gladiator helmet head.
OTHER NEWS
OPTIMIZATION
I have added a graphics preset option into the options menu.
For those with potato PC's, or if the game just runs terribly due to poor optimization on my end, you can run the game on the lowest preset if you like and it should run a significant amount better, at the cost of looking significantly worse.
This is really just a temporary measure so those with potato PC's can actually play the game.
There are some tweaks also done to turn off some performance destroying settings in the individual video options such as post processing.
I have a test PC with an AMD Ryzen 3 3200g, no GPU, just the built in APU and 16gb RAM, it's nothing special or fancy, but it can play the game smoothly now with 75% resolution scale at 1920x1080, low graphics preset.
My aim with this PC is to get it running 100% resolution scale, 1920x1080 with settings on medium or high, so optimization work will come in the future!
OTHER STUFF!
GAMEPAD INPUT FIXED
This was a pain. Valve/Steam causes this problem with an update months ago, and it only got fixed about 3 weeks ago after hounding them to fix the problem.
During the time of fixing the issue when they finally got around to it, I had to refactor a lot of the game input, then they changed things again, so I had to refactor everything again, so I was getting rather frustrated, but eventually, it all started working with the help of the developer of the input plugin I'm using (WM Input Manager) and Valve employees.
To put things into perspective, it took Valve a day to fix the problem. But over 6 months to actually decide to fix the problem.
So now there's nothing you need to do, to get your gamepads working, HOORAY!
(Now lets hope they don't do something else to break the input).
STEAM AUTUMN GAME FESTIVAL WRAP UP
Oooooh boy, this one was an absolute killer for me...and not in a good way.
I put so much work in during the lead up to this festival, making sure I did everything right, marketing the game heaps too and just trying to make it as big as the very successful summer game festival...but no, despite streaming every single day, multiple times a day, Steam screwed up big time for all non-publisher titles.
In summary, I had less than 1% visibility compared to the Summer game festival. I had less downloads and less wishlists than an average day. Essentially, Metal Heads was tucked in a dark corner along with many other indie devs.
It felt like going to a games convention, and when you look at all the booths, there's no developers in sight, there's just pre-recorded footage at all of the booths, zero interaction with developers despite being marketed as something where you can interact with developers of their games.
And the few developers who put in all the effort? Well they were put in a back room, which nobody knew about.
That is essentially what the Autumn game festival was.
Most "live" streams were pre-recorded, and the event scheduler was exploited by the top viewed games so they could stay at the top. We were supposed to only get to do 1 scheduled live-stream event, but there was a way to keep re-creating the event over and over again at different time slots, which all the publisher titles exploited big time.
The developer forums were filled with anger about this, and there's been little to no response from Valve/Steam.
The festival was a waste of time and a complete flop, but also crushed my morale and motivation.
IWOCON - VIRTUAL EXPO
I have been preparing for a virtual game convention called IWO Con (Indie World Order convention) and made a virtual booth for that, but because the organizers loved my booth so much (it's a metal stage), they want me to have a much larger booth and be a key feature of the virtual convention.
I'll update you guys when I have something more to show so you have an idea of what's going on, but it's a lot of work. A hell of a lot of work.
EARLY ACCESS DELAYED
I had to regretfully delay the early access launch which I originally planned for the end of this month.
I have been neglecting my health, I have been neglecting my life, my girlfriend, my family, my friends...everything...to try and hit a deadline that I set for myself for no real good reason other than "November is the best time to launch".
The reality of this though, is November would have been the worst time for me to launch, because unless I slowed down, I'd probably end up in hospital.
I don't have a new release date, and not going to announce one for early access until I am absolutely 100% confident in launching, as I want the early access to be as smooth a launch as possible and for you guys to feel like what you are paying for, is worth buying.
BOARD GAME AND OTHER MINI-GAMES
One of the things that has been taking a lot of time, is working on the board game mode, converting it all to support online multiplayer and to be working properly.
I'm happy to say that the base gameplay loop all works fine online now, but still needs a lot of work before it's ready.
I have been working on converting other mini-games to support online play as well, some of these you guys got to try out during the Autumn game festival.
Some mini-games are easy to convert to online and only take a few hours at worst, others are a lot more involved and take several days of work, with lots of testing, but I'm super excited to be getting all of these mini-games functional online.
Not only am I converting mini-games to online, but I'm also working on new mini-games too, which I LOVE doing, it's incredibly fun and I cannot wait to start testing it with people on the Discord community.
FINAL NOTE
THANK YOU ALL for your support.
I keep seeing the download count going up and up, the wishlists too, and it's incredible to see, especially considering the lack of marketing behind the game, so thank you to every single one of you who download and play Metal Heads, it puts a smile on my face every single day.
YOU ROCK!