Welcome back for more patch notes!
As with previous patches, we're still taking on feedback and prioritising features and fixes. Please keep reporting bugs and making suggestions, and we'll keep working through them into the new year. We're most active in our Discord server, but we also keep up with our Steam discussion board and our [email protected] inbox.
You can now have up to three save slots! If you want to let your little brother try the game out on your computer, or you just want to be able to play the game from scratch, you can now do that without manually copying save files around; just pick a new slot from the menu at the start of the game.
Many people were having trouble with Molecano, mostly due to the tutorial not consistently punishing extra inputs when players were tapping on every beat instead of every second beat. While the game generally doesn't punish inputs while grounded, we've added a small window around when you're about to be launched that will put the mole into the flail state, and hopefully help players to learn the rules properly before advancing from the tutorial. We'll be keeping an eye on this change, and potentially making further adjustments if this doesn't have the desired effect, so please let us know if you're still having trouble.
We also heard from a lot of people who were confused about the Maestro achievement in Symphony. We've made a small update to tint the conductor's swoosh effect blue if you're still on track to earn the achievement, so that people can more easily tell when they've missed and need to start again.
We've also fixed several compatibility issues with the native Linux build. The game requires some X11 features to run correctly, so an error message will now be displayed to Wayland users advising them to add "env -u WAYLAND_DISPLAY %command%" to the game's launch options in Steam in order to force the game to run with XWayland. We've also enabled the Windows build of the custom engine to run under Proton, though note that we generally don't advise using Proton at all except as a last resort, and we're happy to troubleshoot issues with the native Linux build in our Discord server.
Finally, we've made some internal updates to the record player. We're quite sure this shouldn't affect anything else in the game, so there's no need to worry about that. To be honest, I'm not sure why we would even bother to mention it here in the first place...
Game updates
The record player has been updated for no reason in particular
You can now have up to three separate save slots for your save data
Molecano's tutorial and gameplay have been updated to better teach the rules and punish incorrect inputs
The swoosh effect in Symphony is now tinted blue if you're on track for the Maestro achievement
Multiplayer games now treat the keyboard and mouse as separate controllers
The description of the Fallback engine setting has been updated to better explain its shortcomings
Bug fixes
Bop's gameplay demo no longer awards a sticker on mixtapes
Several movement discontinuities have been fixed in appearances of Steady Bears in mixtapes, but please report it if you are still seeing errors
The ordering of the game corner pins now matches the minigames' order of appearance
Changing the engine in the settings menu now does not save until the change is confirmed
Navigating down from the record player tabs now always goes to the first entry
The custom engine now initialises correctly under Proton (but we still advise running the native Linux build instead)
The dedicated default settings for the Steam Deck are no longer applied when running under Proton
The game now detects initialisation errors caused by Wayland and provides instructions to fix them
The last dialogue box in the Snakedown tutorial no longer plays an extra dialogue sound
Accessibility improvements
The keyboard shortcut to toggle the screen reader has been changed to Ctrl+Shift+A (as Win+Shift+A was not working on Windows 11)
Paragraphs of text should now have pauses between them for more speech backends
Editor changes
The snap value has been reworked to be more intuitive
Many stages have been adjusted to function more intuitively at variable speeds
Several stages will no longer process events intended for their mixtape variants and vice versa
Thanks for playing Bits & Bops!