How's it going everyone,
Time to hit our next stop along our path to Chapter Two with the addition of Motorcycles, bikes, some UI Improvements and a brand new first time user experience.
First Time User Experience
This is a big one! We've revamped the opening of the game to better explain mechanics, story elements and your place in the world of Rockhaven. It's packed full of new locations and fun cutscenes, as well as deeper story elements that help tie the various characters and ideas we've formulated during our Early Access adventure so far. We're really proud of this revamped portion of the game and we're hoping it'll help newer players fall in love with Rockhaven and its populace, and highlight what we love about our game moreso than the original opening.
Note: For current players who want to experience this, be sure to back your saves up first!
New Building: Marinara Complex
This gargantuan highrise behemoth of a building is home to various apartments, garages and other oddities awaiting discovery. In the coming weeks Marinara Complex will have new properties to purchase, but for now it's the staging ground of the aforementioned new player experience. More updates on that later!
New Dealership: Mid Life Motorcyles
The day has come! Motorbikes in Rockhaven! Available off rip are two variants:
The Tiger Gnocchi
Perfect for beginners and safety concious riders, the Tiger Gnocchi is a great entry point into two wheeled vehicular experiences.
The Hardy Peterson X
This road hog is the choice of motorcycle clubs and mid-life crisis experiences worldwide. Experience a gas guzzling engine that is equal parts intimidating and impractical.
The bikes are currently in a "first pass" state, and will receive a following update to address handling, sound and other aspects, so please leave us some feedback here on Steam or in the Discord channel if you'd like to see anything tweaked! We'll be on the lookout for suggestions and reports.
UI Improvements:
- Your wallet and bank maximums can now easily be viewed on the inventory screen and will reflect any upgraded maximum capacity from ATM upgrades or Dr Powicks research lab.
- Homie statistics now have an element to better explain what each statistic influences
Fast Travel: (TURD System)
A much requested feature, fast travel is now an option from the Undercity, or any properties you own that you've opened the pipe in. Select an applicable pipe, a destination, and you'll be shot through what is likely years worth of sewage. Worth the risk to save a bit of time, we're sure!
Car Headlights
A smaller touch, but cars now have automatic headlights that turn off and on in low light situations, such as night! More of these smaller vehicle improvements to come.
Engine Upgrade:
We've also done a lot of work on moving It's Only Money from Unreal Engine 5.0 to 5.3, and with it hopefully comes some appreciable performance improvements for players across the hardware spectrum. Let us know if there's anything broken, and as usual we'll tackle it ASAP.
Known Issues:
- The opening driving portion of the new player experience can dip in framerate for some players, but should correct itself as they progress through the parking complex. We suspect this is affecting players on a specific GPU driver version, so if this issue is present, feel free to progress through the mission, as it'll resolve itself, or update your driver and see if that helps. We're open to any reports or logs we can get our hands on in the Discord to better fix this issue.
- Maudes Dome in the boss fight won't raise or lower for some players, we're investigating the cause of this and expect to have it fixed in the next update
- Some players are having crashes, particularly when in vehicles around large gatherings of NPC's. We're trying to replicate this, and have some leads to a fix. If this happens to you, we'd appreciate any crash logs or information you could share. We will fix this as soon as we've isolated the cause.
What's next?
In our next update, we're going to tackle two exciting new features to round out Chapter Two's focus on vehicles:
Vehicle customisation: Any vehicle you've bought will be be able to be modified in a wide variety of ways, such as Turbos, Paintjobs, rims, better stereos, and much more. This isn't limited to just cars, bikes and other odd vehicles will all be modifiable. We're excited to see what kind of crazy combinations y'all come up with, and we'll share a deeper dive on this system soon.
Our first "Side Hustle": Courier Service. Side hustles will be an easily accessible way to grind out money, either solo or friends. Think of them as something halfway between a narrative mission and a business. The more you do a Side Hustle, the greater the rewards, including persistent cash raises and other cool exclusive goodies.
Beyond these two major features, there's some fun other bits of content and news on the way that we're sure will please the Rockhaven community, so until then, we'll talk soon, and keep us posted if anything needs fixing!
