Hi everyone! It’s been just over a day since Early Access launch, so we wanted to check in to update you on the issues some of you ran into and what we're doing to fix them. We’re so sorry to anyone who’s had the problems listed below, and rest assured: we’re doing everything we can to fix them as soon as physically possible. Let's get to it!
Key Distribution
Easily the biggest issue, for obvious reasons. We identified a substantial error in key counts from our data formatting that caused many of our Kickstarter backers to not receive the correct number of keys when the game went live. We’re so sorry about this issue! We’ve been working non-stop (literally) since launch to try to get this rectified as quickly as possible, but it unfortunately turned out to be a more fundamental issue with our data than we anticipated (rather than an issue with our email server), meaning that the effects were fairly widespread. Some of you may have noticed an attempt to send out missing keys earlier may have also included incorrect or duplicate keys - this ultimately stems from the same issue.
For those of you who are missing keys (or didn’t get keys at all when you should): sorry this took us a bit of time to figure out! Your missing keys should be going out via email right now. If you still haven’t received all of your keys within 24 hours (sorry!), please send us an email at [email protected] with your Kickstarter backer email.
For those of you who received extra keys: we’re currently sorting this out. It looks like in all likelihood, we’re going to need to send you a new email with the correct number of new keys while revoking your old ones at some point soon. For now, your key(s) should continue to work - our goal is to minimize downtime between your keys given in error getting revoked and your corrected keys arriving, if you have any. We’ll keep you updated and put out another news post if and when we start this process.
For everyone else: we’re still working on this, but it’s looking like you may be receiving a new key (even if your key was working) if it was a duplicate sent in error. There’s also a chance we might end up resetting and resending all keys (trying to avoid this option through any means possible, since it’d be pretty inconvenient!). Again, we’re trying to minimize downtime between your key being deactivated and the new one arriving - we’ll keep you updated and put out another news post if and when we start this process.
For those of you with copies of the game purchased through Kickstarter add-ons: we will be reaching out to you once we get our data squared away regarding which platform you want a copy of the game for.
Again, we’re sorry to any of you who ran into either of these problems! The last thing we want anyone to have to worry about around launch day is whether or not they can actually play the game. We’re doing our best to get everything corrected right away.
Performance/Online
The most common problems with the Early Access launch build we've heard from you stem from performance. This includes things like intermittent stutters, general slowdowns and online performance. Rollback online will often exacerbate existing issues - since it involves the performance-intensive task of simulating the game state a bunch of times per frame, any issues will get magnified online (and if you're playing against someone else who's having issues, they'll end up affecting your experience, too).
These issues have likely existed for some time, but do not seem to be affecting all players. Notably, we were not experiencing the issues that have been reported on any of our own computers, and we definitely underestimated how pervasive they would be. We're already looking into potential causes, but not being able to experience the problems ourselves means we need more data so we can better diagnose the issues. If you're running into issues in this area, so sorry for the trouble! If you have a few minutes to spare, we would really appreciate it if you could fill out this survey to help us track down the issues: https://forms.gle/dqKcvFMmmN1JRTyu9.
In the short term, addressing performance issues is going to be our top priority on the engineering end. We'll be using the data from the above survey to help identify problems, but we do have some leads. Embedding scripting logic into the executable has proven to have a big impact on performance for many of our testers - overall, we've seen performance improvements of around 40% from these changes alone. One of the big fixes we have coming soon will be optimizing our palette shader generation code, which should generally improve performance and help those of you who are experiencing hitches upon spawning something that uses the palette system, like an assist.
Controller Issues
Similarly to the above issues, we definitely underestimated issues here since they don't happen on the controllers that we use, and we’re so sorry for the bad experiences some of you have had as a result! We built out a controller-specific survey to help us track down related issues. Our goal is to support all commonly used controller types and we definitely don't consider the current implementation acceptable, so if you're running into issues please fill out the following survey if you have a moment: https://forms.gle/Cecbyq8B8vPAr2N86.
Upcoming Content
On the content end, there's a lot coming down the pipeline. In the shorter term, the current characters have around 90% of their sprites completely filled in, with many of the remaining animations being shorter/supplemental animations, so our immediate goal is to get those filled out quickly so we can focus on getting the 5th character. Our art team is going to be able to focus primarily on these animations from this point onward, so you can expect progress in this area to be accelerated significantly. We’ll also be interspersing development of new assists and stages into our timeline. Stage hazards for Backyard and Stratostar were temporarily disabled due to bugs when played in rollback online, but we expect to be able to resolve these issues and get them re-enabled as soon as we handle some of the higher-priority engine focus areas in the above sections. Our other focus areas include finishing up unfinished visual effects and fleshing out training mode with more features.
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That’s it for now! Again, a big apology to any of you who ran into any of the issues listed above. We’re doing everything in our power to knock them out as soon as we possibly can. Thank you for your patience!
- Team Fray