Excuse my friend. He's dead tired.
That's because we were at Radius Festival in London on Friday & Saturday... but did that stop us from making Tango Fiesta better? No it did not!
We managed to isolate and fix some interesting bugs, while improving the combat a touch too. And that's all while appearing on the livestream with Mike Bithell & Rami from Vlambeer playing our humble little game! Mega shout-out to Andrew Roper (Tango's programmer extraordinaire) for making that so much fun to watch :D
So, those tweaks we've made?
Pause & Quit
You can now Pause the game and either Resume or Quit right out in Singleplayer! You can do the same in Local, but in Online games - while you can still bring the menu up and Quit out as either Host or Client - you can’t pause the action. It’d be a bit of a nightmare to code, and frankly it’d annoy all the other players too :D Obviously if the Host quits, the game ends. We’re not sure if/when we’ll be able to get Host Migration in, it’s pretty advanced stuff!
Revival
We’ve overhauled the revival system so that, fingers crossed, it no longer gets confused with players. We saw a lot of issues at Radius festival regarding this, which was actually rather good because it’s hard to track down by ourselves! We’re aware that the visual info sometimes doesn’t pop up for everyone, but rest assured if you see a downed teammate, run over and hold ‘Action’ then you’ll help him back up… with half health.
Player Pointers
In both Local and Online games, we’ve added small colour-coded arrows to the HUD. Never again get stranded or lost! It’s a tiny thing, but dang if it doesn’t help out a lot.
Hit GFX
We've added a red flash to enemies - and a white flash to the player - for every time they're hit by an attack. It makes it feel even better when you're winning, and gives you more info about when you're losing. Or rather, if the amazing dodging around all those bullets was actually amazing or not.
Jungle Bad Guys
We noticed that Jungle was a bit broken. It wasn't spawning in our special (semi-invisible, ugly, laser gun toting) bad guys, and so the level was proving very difficult to finish. But we fixed it! So now the game should play properly, progress properly, and you'll all be having more fun. Or dying more.
Remember... if it bleeds, you can kill it.
Finally, a bit of a treat. We're hard at work on the bugs, of course, but we know you guys want more bad guys to fight with more interesting behaviours, more objectives to complete, more movie references to giggle/groan at... basically more content and more fun.
Ewan and myself have been hard at work on tons of new stuff that we're going to introduce in our regular patches. We're very hopeful that this week should see the introduction of our Jungle Boss, and so we thought you'd like a sneaky peek at him!
The true story behind an alien race that invents active camouflage technology - and is only really ever described as an "ugly mofo" - is that they invented cloaking devices because they're so darn ugly! Aww, they're so vain.
It'll be attacking you with alien slime and a stomp attack... so keep an eye on the treeline.
Look out for he/she/ittowards the end of the week (with luck) and we've got plenty more cool stuff to show off in the coming weeks & months.
Until next time… stick around!
FULL CHANGELOG:
Added
- Visual damage effect for enemies and players (red flash for enemies, white flash for players).
- Pause menu added to online & offline gameplay.
- Added shadow to player and bullets.
- Added letterbox effect when the camera is focussing on a point of interest.
- Added arrows to show where team-mates are when off-screen.
Updated
- Updated how health updates are synchronised over the network in online games.
- Updated grenade behaviours (diagonal throws work properly now).
- Health packs now restore 100% of your health.
- Heavy Machinegun Enemy now has more health.
- Heavy Machinegun Enemy now shoots fewer bullets per salvo.
- Heavy Machinegun Enemy now shoot slightly slower (time between bullets increased).
- Player's shotguns tweaked (slightly less range, fewer pellets).
Fixed
- Re-wrote the revival system for online and offline play, removing the bugs that were being encountered (admittedly still some hanging around).
- Bullets no longer collide with enemy corpses.
- Fixed character selection for local games, so it should lock in your character at the correct time.
- Fixed damage effects not showing up in online multiplayer for clients.
- Fixed grenade explosions not showing up on clients in online multiplayer.
- Fixed keyboard control issue where you were unable to revive other players.
- Fixed predator enemy type spawning routine in the jungle levels.
- Player melee attack range fixed.
- Spacebar now no longer triggers weird noises in the Lobby when typing in chat.