We’ve packed Kabonk! with a ton of fun and exciting improvements! And did some profiling. Thanks Ari!
Originally, we planned to release the game in September/October, and technically, that could’ve worked. But as we’ve said time and time again: a game is never truly finished. Sure, there are plenty of "finished" games out there, and Kabonk! is, in a sense, complete. But like any development project, there’s always room to make it better: tweaking gameplay, refining code, boosting FPS, adjusting particles, enhancing VFX, and so much more.
Over the past few months, with the extra time we’ve had, we’ve polished not only the visuals and game flow but also the fun* factor. Oh, and we’ve significantly boosted performance: we’ve even doubled the FPS on some machines! Why? Because why not? Why wouldn’t we aim to make this gameplay-heavy game run as smoothly as possible?
Dusting Off
We pulled some older laptops out of storage and tested Kabonk!... Crash. Wait, what?!
We’ve all seen, read, and heard players talk about Unreal Engine games crashing. How is it that games from 10+ years ago often look better, run smoother, and crash less than some of today’s biggest titles? Unacceptable, right? Well?:
*It’s complicated.
Develop Like a Gamer
We’re gamers ourselves. We’ve spent hours optimizing factories in games like Factorio, refusing to blame the game when FPS dipped... instead, we improved the factory until it ran smoothly. So why not apply that same mindset to Kabonk!? And that’s exactly what we did.
We’ve been:
Improving... building... zipping... uploading to Steam... deploying... updating Steam... playtesting... and repeating that cycle for days and days**.
We won’t bore you with every detail (yet), but we even added an automatic safe mode. If the game may crash (and for all our sake, lets hope not), it dynamically adjusts performance (at the cost of some visuals) to ensure the game will start.
But Wait, There’s More!
Here’s a quick rundown of what we’ve added and improved:
Added 4 unique new achievements
Fixed physics for the splitting sphere bricks
Enhanced visuals and materials for splitting sphere bricks
Added sound effects for the ping pong effect
Introduced a brand-new song
Improved tiling for the dungeon and jungle themes
Added extra wow factor when finishing the main game
Reduced difficulty scaling in endless mode
Removed unused code, actors, and other clutter
Lowered memory usage in the lobby
Translated a bunch of words.
Remember when we said no UI? Nah, me neither.
We Learn, We Improve
**It is like a core game loop huh, but than way to much overhead.
As always, thank you and we’ll catch you in the next update!