G'day Rat Racers!
This is the start of a Weekly Report post I'll be making each week, either before or after the release of a game update. Expect more of these in future!
One thing I've felt was lacking in the game's progression system since release was the absence of any unlockable rewards for hitting specific milestones, such as ranking up in your player profile. The first way I'll address this is something some of you may have been waiting for; Steam Achievements. I'm glad to announce that they're now in the pipeline!
Several of the progression achievements already work in an internal test build, and more will be added in future updates. In addition, there will be three new Rats unlockable with the rankup system! Bronze, Silver and Gold rats will be unlocked by achieving Rat Racing Connoisseur, Rat Racing Champion and Rat Racing Legend as you play.
Now, let's talk about Splitscreen. While the Splitscreen multiplayer works, there were several issues I identified with it when I finally had the chance to test it properly with 4 players:
If someone's controller disconnected, they'd be able to reconnect it and keep playing, but the controller order would then rearrange itself after the race ends. The testing scenario for this was rather extreme as we were playing on a TV wirelessly streaming the host PC's screen, with all four controllers connected via a Bluetooth Adapter behind a wall. Definitely not the best setup to play on if you care about latency but it did uncover this issue so it had a silver lining!
Currently, every splitscreen player's rat fur colour is the same as the Player's chosen colour for splitscreen races. This is undesirable both because of player visibility and also the fact your friends can't pick their favourite colour. :(
I'll be addressing both with a new "player join" system that requires a player on a different controller to press a button to be joined up to the game session, rather than having any player select the number of participants after selecting the game mode, race course environment and CPU difficulty. The aim is to keep the original controller order even if a player drops out and reconnects. In addition, the screen that will replace the original "how many players?" menu will be where your friends (and yourself, for that matter) can pick their favourite colour to race with.
And finally... A previous update broke the audio for player 4 and muted some audio cues for players other than player 1. Oops. This has already been fixed internally and will ship with the next game update.
And that is all!
This update was originally intended to ship this week but it's been deferred as it needs a little more time to cook. See y'all again in the next weekly report.