March's monthly patch is OUT! You now get to look at more than exactly one thing in the background when playing most songs in arcade mode. Plus: more things
GENERAL CHANGES
The game has been moved over to Unity 6 from a much older version to help future-proof the game and make it a little more extendable and updatable; we avoided doing this for a long time because I don't know if you know this but any time you move to a new version of the game engine you're using Everything Breaks.
Which is why we tested it a lot before doing this, and from our testing nothing should be broken, but please tell us if this actually isn't true
The move to Unity 6 may extremely negligibly improve performance for some! Hooray! More optimizations directly on the game itself are being made behind the scenes and those will be added into the game once we ensure stability later in the year.
ARCADE MODE CHANGES
GO FIGURE and ALTERNATIVE POLICING STRATEGY are both now playable in arcade mode.
A new STAR chart has also been added for Proper Rhythm (STAR Lesson).
The big marquee thing though is that 15+ playable stages have been added to arcade mode. By default, we've configured it so songs are set to certain stages, but you can override this if you want to defy god
Some of these stages are locked behind Story Mode progress and will unlock automatically if you've already completed those chapters.
I'm very excited for you to all simultaneously to discover what one of the stages we added is and do the thing we expect you to do as a result
Fixed how challenges are fired off upon game bootup to prevent the likelihood of missing story mode related challenge unlocks.
Fixed various challenges, notably more challenges in Folio 12 and the Birthday one.
Adjusted how scores merge - Full Combo flags and ranks are now saved separately from score, meaning these won't be overwritten if you got a higher point score but lower rank / no full combo.
You can now toggle color-coded accuracy judgments, which will change the color of each judgment to help better distinguish them.
THINGS WE'RE LOOKING AT NOW:
File Size: We've found ways where we can significantly cut down file size for the game and will make these optimizations in a later patch!
Game Performance: Optimizations are still under way but is something we're handling delicately as we can. We've noticed some of the new stages added may have differing performance from the original train station - remember that you can change the stage back at any time!
Fail-Restart and Improvements to Game Offset Sync: Still in the oven, we promise.
"Spike Note Bugs": Still being worked on! Please hit us up about these if you notice them, as they're in the center of the unfortunate venn diagram between "only extremely skilled players will notice this" and "it only happens to some people," which makes them difficult to test.
As always, just because we didn't mention an issue here does not mean we aren't aware of it!
WHAT'S NEXT?
i'm posting this again because i spent a lot of time on it
A NOTE WRITTEN BY JEFF: "Next month will feature our Beatmap Editor and two new songs, one of which will be a surprise collab! Hint: You might want to turn the lights on for this one." I don't know what Jeff means by this but it's exciting to me to read it
<3 FROM D-CELL