"In FEBRUARY?!" - I hear you cry - "But that's January's basement!"
And right you are! However our love to you all knows no bounds, no limit, and so we crawled out of the winter holidays, past the seasonal sludge that is Late Winter, and did our gosh darn best!
TL;DR:
I'm not reading all that just tell me what's up
✨ New Features:
🎖️ Holo-Brooches
🕹️ Steam Deck
🌍 Polish Subtitles
And of course tons of improvements:
🎲 Gameplay
🚶♀️ NPCs
🧮 Shaders & Renderers
🧙♀️ Tiny Tweaks here and there
Those of you up for a deep dive, let's go!!!!
Those of you who aren't, you're dismissed, have a wonderful week 😌
✨ NEW FEATURES
🎖️ HOLO-BROOCHES
Heading to the Museum will now prompt a message that tells you that a Holo-Brooch has been unlocked! Once unlocked, you can start collecting!!
Holo-Brooches are items Foster gets to equip as part of his outfit!
Previously only being a small aspect of the game, we've come up with a cute and elaborate way to make them more fun:
- More: Before, the Holo-Brooch came in 3 standout designs; Joey, Citadel, and Spankles. If you think those were cool, just wait to see how many there are now!
- New Design: While they previously had a more muted appearance, we got our very talented UI dev Simon to give them a vivid spruce up; New art, new shaders and "you can actually tell what they are" - wise words from the dev team.
- MINOS: When entering MINOS terminals, you can now find a new tab that lets you keep track of your discovered Holo-Brooches.
- Where?? How??? Silly you'd ask! It's an adventure game!!! Explore, be weird with it. Live a little. Try out items where they don't belong. Have a snoop where you shouldn't. Click on things. Be a tiny bit unhinged, as a treat!
🕹️ STEAM DECK
Currently working on getting verified on Steam Deck!
Not only does Beyond A Steel Sky fully support Steam Deck, this update makes sure everything is optimized to run as beautifully on it as possible!
Notice us Senpai (ꈍ ᴗ ꈍ✿)
🌍 POLISH SUBTITLES
To jest dobre, super dobre!
Don't worry, we left it to the professionals...
Beyond A Steel Sky now has Polish text localisation, dobrej zabawy!
Enjoy your new Features, and remember kids
🎲 GAMEPLAY
🎞️ INTRO COMIC
- Skipping Some of you smarty pants were switching control inputs while the intro was playing, and it glitched out to be unskippable!!!! I mean.. we fixed it but damn, kids these days, no chill. (Just kidding we love you)
- Tabbing out Tabbing out during the intro also made the sound go out of sync with the animation. Sometimes the subtitles would even go missing. But no more!
👨 FOSTER
- Multi-tasking Foster used to have to stop everything he's doing just to pull the Hacker out?? Super useless. Walk and talk buddy, it's not rocket surgery!
- Going Viral Big, BIG End-Game Spoiler, but very funny; So to line up character interaction with animation, we make Foster approach things from a specific angle or direction. You click on it, and he'll position himself in a way that we have the animation for. Makes sense, looks good, what could possibly go wrong??? Now, were you to approach the globe from a opposite direction because you entered the scene on the wrong side of the room for some insane reason (looking at you Speedrunners) Foster would cross the room to go to his animation trigger spot, walk straight through the Virus, and DIE. We now told Foster to never ever touch the virus. You really gotta spell things out, huh.
🧩 PUZZLE RELATED
- Woop Woop that's the sound of the Police Spoilers ahead: In Recycling there is a puzzle where you need to crush your crowbar into a machine and if you do this a Security Droid should come to investigate. However, when saving and reloading in a particular way the Security Droid would just take the beeline for your ass, walls didn't exist to him, he was just coming for you. Terrifying. Also not true anymore.
- Hint States Some Speedrunners would start being out of sync with the Hint States because things were done in such an overly efficient way, that we didn't account for (like using prior play-through knowledge and doing things ahead of time). We're onto you. I think we fixed it!...
- Cube Puzzle Camera Bug A little spoilery: When you were on one Cube in the Cube puzzle, and held your joystick down to the bottom left, the camera would keep moving down, the time you'd move to the next cube you'd be just moved along horizontally, but the vertical (which you were in the - on, all the way down) became your new 0 and you were stuck seeing nothing during one of the most important scenes in the whole game. Devastating..
🙅♀️ NPC SHENANIGANS
🤖 JOEY
- Double Joey all the way across the sky I'll tell you a little secret. Every player model has a stunt double for the cutscenes. They're not the same.. And when one of them doesn't make like a 🌳 and 🍃 you end up with two of them! - This also happened to Orana in Graham's Apartment! Thank you for reporting, this should now be fixed!
- Joey clipping into Foster When Joey is in his shell, flying he's a much taller than we accounted for. We now accounted for it.
- Rogue Joey Hat Just floating around. Wild. We caught it though!
- "Improved Joey Shell Initialisation" Better Joey. Strong Joey. Hunk Joey. Shiny Joey.
🚶♀️ LITERALLY ANYYONE ELSE
- Reginald Poetry Reading Got a few complaints that the turnout was bad. There are now more NPCs at the recital. Happy, Reg?
- Gang Gang Bullies. They sometimes pushed players into a soft-lock by pushing the player off the NavMesh! Super mean. We gave them a talking to.
- NPC Triplets SORRY! We realised that the rate of NPC twins and triplets was unrealistic and not immersive. Less of that. Hopefully.
🧮 SHADERS & RENDERERS
- Quick Textures So when you load up a game the engine is trying to load up textures as quickly as possible by looking up what's in memory first before refining it later. This is why sometimes things look a little blocky before they become clearer as the game is finished loading up. Your game is basically "streaming" in the high quality textures by looking them up once needed. But from now on textures that are always needed, like Foster, will just exist with a high-end texture, no need to "stream" - that end result will just look like he's always his most handsome self.
- Well lit NPCs So to save you all a lot of memory it's good manners to "bake" lighting into a level rather than calculate it in run-time. It's also good manners to always update it when you move or change anything in that level so it doesn't look wrong. I don't know like making NPCS IMPOSSIBLY BRIGHT IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT?? They look way less radio-active now.
- Aspiration Gala Black Screen We fixed some Race Conditions on Aspiration Gala. Race Conditions are the order a program is told to load things in. When you enter a level there are a ton of things that need to happen at once and it will determine a hierarchy based on factors like your device, and your technical constrains. Sometimes these race conditions get loaded in the wrong order, which is 1. hard to identify, and 2. hard to pin down as it can be due to a plethora of reasons. But ladies and gentlemen, (and those betwixed) we got 'em.
- Less expensive stink So, turns out the stink lines on the truck are hella expensive on the frame-rate.. We made it stink less for you. We did the same for mist in a few other places. Things tend to stink, and mist less. I think that's a fair way to summarize this.
- Desert Sun now casting more elaborate Shadows Like for Telephone poles, and... rocks. Worth the 3080, wasn't it
🧙♀️ TINY TWEAKS HERE AND THERE
- Game Saves We added a visual distinction to game saves and autosaves!
- Loading Spoilers If you moved the camera too quickly maps and things would load up in an order that could spoil some of the game (if for example something was hidden behind a wall) - We made note of these areas and we now play our cards closer to the chest.
- Performance upgrade: Hacking & Pausing Okay this one sounds a little boring but it's a huge quality of life update! When you used to Pause or pull out the Hacker the game continued existing in the background. It now doesn't. It's GONE. It makes everything more responsive, more stable, AND it's a blessing on the battery
- What a Drag When multiple game controllers were connected, dragging and dropping would sometimes go a bit bonkers. No more bonk.
- Better collisions More solid Furniture. 10/10 would stub your toe!
- Deserters You think it's funny running into the desert, out of bounds??? Well you're right, and now it won't glitch you out so much.
- Revolution Splashscreen Now uses the updated logo! Very snazzy.
- Switching between languages Switching languages willy nilly should NEVER MAKE THE GAME CRASH!!! And it doesn't...
- Subtitles Sometimes the game got confused about where to put a subtitle; the speech bubble or bottom text. And then it did both 🤦♂️
- Tweaked layout in places Some stuff is now smaller, or bigger, or more consistent
- Pause Menu A completely redone Help Screen UI for clearer, more useful information when using a controller.
💖 HUGE THANKS
It's truly heart-warming to feel so close to you, and we want you to know that while Beyond A Steel Sky has been out for over a year, we still care deeply about your gameplay experiences.
So please don't feel shy, and reach out any time!
Lots of love from the whole team at Revolution Software