It turns out that some people may have been playing a more difficult game than others. Unbeknownst to me, one of the two systems responsible for placing obstacles in front of the player, specifically the Smart Placement System, was framerate dependent.
Ironic isn’t it. It wasn’t acting very smart. SPS is a custom-built algorithm that uses animation curve graphs using speed, world position, altitude, etc. to dynamically change the spawn rate of obstacles.
So, it turns out that this algorithm was run every frame instead of every fixed frame, so people with higher framerates saw more obstacles because the algorithm was literally running more often making the game unfair and not fun.
I’ve moved the algorithm to fixed update which means regardless of framerate, the algorithm will be run the same number of times. I haven’t ever caught this because I never run the game at super high framerates. Also, low framerates will receive more obstacles now because of this fix. I’m sorry for not catching this before release, but it seemed like it was working well until I heard that some people were getting too many / too little obstacles.
In summary the following bugs should be fixed:
• Levels will now have the same number of obstacles regardless of framerate. They still use other statistics to alter spawn rate, but framerate is not one of them
• I have had to rebalance obstacles and power-up spawning for all levels. I have tested each level but let me know if any of them seem off.
• Muffled sound was applied to landing when it shouldn’t be