Hello to all drivers, front seat and back!
First, we wanted to express our heartfelt thanks to everyone playing the Backseat Drivers demo. We've been AMAZED by the response so far. Over 30,000 demo players and tons of wishlists is way more attention than we expected on our little game, so THANK YOU for playing, streaming, and for all your videos and your feedback. We've found it incredibly motivating to see so many people having fun with the game, and it's made us all the more excited to navigate our roadmap to a finished product you and your friends will love. If you haven't already, be sure to join the GhostJam discord here to share your experience and suggestions!
We're hard at work on the full game and its levels, features and other content, but in the week since the demo's release we've been listening to your feedback and collecting bug reports to smooth things out for those of you who have had a bumpy ride so far. Here's the patchnotes for our first hotfix:
- This hotfix has a "hot" fix! Some passengers were having a little trouble extinguishing themselves after getting set on fire, so the car's cool AC setting is now more aggressive with extinguishing flames.
- We've tweaked the checkpoint after the end of the death-defying plank crossing section to be a little more forgiving — it's now closer to the end of the planks so that players who manage to JUST ABOUT cross the planks (but then accidentally reverse to their doom) don't have to cross all over again. So now if you make backwards progress it's just a skill issue.
- Fixed some syncing issues when a seat rolls back. Should be able to push gam-gam back to the steering wheel a little easier now.
- Any rolled back seats now reset when restarting at a checkpoint, as if by magic.
- Annnnnndd! Grandma's "help I'm stuck looking at the roof because my seat is tilted back ahhhh" rollback animation loop now ends properly when her seat is reset.
- Made it easier to invite an antisocial friend to a lobby when appearing as offline or invisible on Steam: there's now an "Offline" category.
- Added input/keys overview when accessing the Esc/Pause menu in gameplay, so you can figure out how your own hands and body work even if you've lost all your post-it notes.
- Smoother movement for items + physics objects! This is now independent from the host's frame rate/netupdate rate, so you won't see a slideshow of junk flying around when you smash into a wall if you're playing with somebody on a slower connection or machine.
- Tweaked the car's collision to help with grandma's "blind spot" (as if everything isn't a blind spot for her). We're still addressing more issues here, so please keep the feedback coming.
- We've also tweaked collision of items inside the car to slightly favor visibility over "realism" (lol), so you won't e.g. lose the parking ticket underneath the surface of the center console
- We did an evil ritual with some dark spirits and they responded favorably: there should be no more doubled up ghost barriers.
- Voice chat has been fixed. When using ingame voice chat, you should no longer hear yourself back, and the other player should now be able to hear you. I mean, come on, voice chat. You had one job.
Don't forget to join our Discord here to give your suggestions, feedback and bug reports, and wishlist the game on Steam here!
Thanks again, everybody! We'll come pick you up when it's time for the next one.