Hey everyone! It is my pleasure to announce that at long last, update 1.3 is now out and available for everyone to enjoy! This update has been in the making for pretty much the entire year, and was held up by lots of required engine tuning and fixes. But at long last, the last update predating the level editor is out - so let's talk about it!! Included in this update is:
FULL Controller & Steam Deck Support!
Do you own a Steam Deck? Or maybe you just really like playing on controller? We have news for you: The game is now fully compatible with controllers! The entire game can easily be navigated and interfaced with, with zero intervention from the keyboard nor mouse.
If you also prefer to use a touchpad rather than the joysticks during gameplay, there's an option in the settings to disable joystick influence!
Steam Achievements!
Something we've wanted to add for a very long time - the game now has over 30 achievements to earn! Ranging from simple level clears, to combos and wacky challenges mixed in. We tried to have every type of achievement you tend to see - thank you to the community for helping suggest achievement ideas!!
And A Volley of Minor Features:
Level List: See all of your scores for all levels in a big, easy-to-navigate list! This list will also see more utility and use in the 2.0 update (which includes the level editor).
Pausing: You can now reliably pause, adjust all settings, and resume during gameplay of any level! Don't like the flash strength? Just change it!
Level Balance: The hardest three levels in the game have received changes in their mapping to make them more fun, yet still challenging to play. These levels should hopefully be less frustrating, and it should be easier to get into the flow when playing them.
Parser Smoothing: Among a bunch of other new settings, there's now a new "parser smoothing" system that removes the weird jitter your parser used to experience when moving the mouse slowly. The resulting gameplay looks far, far smoother, but it makes the player slightly lag behind the mouse on levels more extreme than what's offered in the vanilla game. For this reason, it's a toggle!
Discord Rich Presence: On Discord, the appearance of the game in your profile UI as you play it has been significantly upgraded with custom icons depending on what you're doing!
Parser Inversion: Have a hard time seeing your parser? Want to use black instead of white? Now you can invert the parser's color for a void-like look!
Optimizations & Fixes: The game is about half as heavy on your CPU as it used to be!!
How's The Level Editor Going?
A: Pretty well!
Our latest progress was an interface for editing level metadata, such as the level name, author, mapper, etc. If this is your first time reading in a while, we have working note placement, song playback, and value editing support. The next steps are some more metadata options we use as developers, and adding triplet support. From there it's just exporting and importing, so we're pretty far along with it already!
If you'd like to learn more about how the editor's going as it develops, consider joining the Discord and following us on Youtube, Instagram and Tiktok. We're participating in a game jam pretty soon, but after that, development should return to normal speed. Thank you so much for sticking with us all this time, and we can't wait to release the first public beta for 2.0. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays :)
