Weekly Progress Report #80: All Levels Now Playable!!

Today marks a huge milestone for PogoChamp development. With this release, all of the planned levels are now playable! It has been almost 1 year (362 days) since the Early Access launch, and it feels amazing to call the game "content complete" at this point. (Until I think of something else "really cool" that I can't help but add.)

This marks the end of any planned new levels, but I'm not done working on PogoChamp. There are still a few features I plan to add, and lots of places that need more polish & attention.

Level 100: The Beginning.

I'd rather not spoil anything about the end-game content, so I won't be including a level teaser in this post, but I hope those of you who make your way through to the end will enjoy what's in store.

Unofficial VS Mode

Over the last couple weeks, I started brainstorming ways to play PogoChamp competitively against your friends. I was focusing on ways to play that didn't involve any new features to be added to the game, and I came up with something I think is pretty fun. WaltzingDucks (the current #1 player on the leaderboards) and I played this a few times and had a blast.

C.H.A.M.P.

This is a variant of the Basketball game HORSE, for PogoChamp. This mode is for 2 players, but could probably be modified to support more. The game is first to 5 points. Players take turns competing in individual levels, alternating “Attack” and “Defense”.

Steps

1. Attacking player picks a level that hasn’t been chosen yet.
2. Attacking player has 5 attempts to complete the level.
   1. If they beat the level, that becomes the challenge time*, and move on to step 3.
   2. If they don’t beat the level, the next player becomes the attacker, and you repeat step 2.
3. Defending player now has 5 attempts to beat the challenge time on that level.
   1. If they don’t beat the time in their 5 attempts, the attacker gains a point.
4. The Defending player becomes the new Attacker, go to step 1.

* If the Attacker completes a level but still has attempts remaining, they can try the level again, but only the final attempt counts as the challenge time.

Setup

To see what the other person is doing, you’ll both need to be screensharing. You can do this by going into a Discord voice channel and both picking “Stream” (doing it in a direct call will replace the other person’s stream). Feel free to use the #stream-1, #stream-2, etc channels in the PogoChamp Discord for this. I can also create additional channels that only allow 2 people if you want to play privately.. This works best with multiple monitors, but should be fine if you only have 1, you’ll just need to swap back and forth if you want to watch the other person’s attempts. When you set a challenge time, just leave your game on the replay, so the other person can watch it & compare / plan their route. This will also prevent the need to remember what the challenge time was exactly, because the replay shows the time.

Variations & Optional Rules

• You can change the number of attempts from 5 to any other number you want. WaltzingDucks and I found that 3 or 5 felt pretty good, but we’re also probably the 2 most experienced PogoChamp players in the world, hahah. If the experience/skill level difference of the two players is big, you can give players different numbers of attempts as a way to make it more fair.
• Level Veto: you can add in some number of Vetoes that people can use to force the attacker to choose a different level. These can either be done at the beginning of the match, or after a player picks a level you can have the option to veto it.

Speedrunning

With all the levels available, it's now open season for speedrunnning! PogoChamp already has a page on Speedrun.com. The two current categories are "All Levels complete" and "All Rainbow Gems", but let me know if there are other categories you'd like to see.

Currently I'm using the in-game timer for listing speedrun times, but I also plan to add support for autosplits external timers like LiveSplit to the game

Changelog

• CONTENT: New level: The Beginning. (#100).
• CONTENT: New Level: The End. (#101).
• CONTENT: Added end-game cutscenes (still need some work / SFX stuff).
• CONTENT: Added credits.
• BUG FIX: Transcendence achievement is now unlockable.
• BUG FIX: Beyond Perfect achievement is now unlockable.
• BUG FIX: Updated Supernova unlock condition from 300 stars to "all stars".
• BUG FIX: Fix completion % measurements in the profile menu.
• BUG FIX: Fix achievement notification text overlapping for long achievement names.
• BUG FIX: Fast Travel achievement has been reworked to be attainable again (it used to be "Use the quick select menu", but that menu doesn't exist anymore, so now it's "Warp between levels in Level Select", which you can do by just hitting left/right, or clicking on a level that's more than 1 away from your current position).