G'day Rat Racers, and welcome to the weekly report!
Today I'll be discussing the newest update's upcoming content, which will be released in a few hours at most.
The first thing I would like to talk about is game progress; While implementing the Steam Achievements coming with this update, I discovered that the game was not tracking first place finishes. For any race. At all. Oops.
I immediately corrected this when I found it but what about existing save files? Technically this means somehow a player may have done 100+ races but had none of them count as first place finishes, which would make certain achievements very difficult if not borderline impossible to achieve for existing "broken" saves.
Now we're left with a difficult decision; either keep existing save files as-is and risk some achievements being harder to get for some players, or have each save file soft-reset from scratch. Another idea I had was to reset only the race counts but grandfather in the old racing rank. Unfortunately this didn't work as well as I'd hoped in practice as admittedly the game's code is a bit of a spaghetti mess.
Therefore I've regrettably had to go the nuclear option; With the next game update, all race progress on your save will be reset. I do apologise for this insane slip-up and will ensure save file breaking changes don't happen in future.
Your currently selected Rat Skin will be kept however and the game will pretend you've first launched the game exactly on the day this upcoming update is installed and launched, which will allow certain achievements to unlock correctly. Your performance ratio will also be reset to 50/50 (new saves start at 60/40) and recalibrated; more on changes to this in the coming sections of this report.
Now, onto the new content. There is now an entirely new Splitscreen system! This new interface completely replaces the old "How many players?" screen.
Players now join and leave by connecting a controller and pressing their controllers equivalent of the Start Button (START on an Xbox Controller, OPTIONS on a PlayStation(R) Controller) and leaving by physically/wirelessly disconnecting their controller. In addition, multiple Rats now appear on this screen, one per player, where you can visibly see which Rat colour you've chosen.
As you can see, each player can now select their own colour, instead of inheriting Player 1's colour. Colour changes to Players 2-4 are temporary and will reset when the game is closed - let me know if you'd like this to be permanent.
Speaking of permanent, once a race has started, controller order is finally preserved across races.
Yes, even if someone's controller's batteries die mid-race and have to be changed or that Bluetooth dongle from Temu couldn't keep up with having all three of your friend's controllers connected.
Now, a sneak peek at the Rat Racing Rank rewards; the game now rewards Bronze, Silver and Gold Rats to players who complete specific numbers of races! When a new rank is unlocked, as per the previous game update, the game will show a notification but this time it will also unlock one of these new colours. (Click on the images to view at full size)
Speaking of race progress, I have altered the OOTB (That is, Out-of-the-box) experience of the game a bit, given recent feedback. Admittedly, it was hard to tell for some players if the game's numerous modes in "Join Rat Race" actually existed in the game or not until the first milestone (completing 10 races) was hit. In addition, the player profile tile in the top left of the main menu didn't exactly make itself obvious as a selectable button to enter the Player Profile menu. I have addressed this with the following:
Now when first booting the game, any time you select "Join Rat Race," a box will appear on the left side showing the game is in "onboarding" mode, along with the number of races remaining to unlock all other race modes.
The game now only requires 5 races to achieve "Rat Racing Apprentice," which unlocks all other race modes and Hard CPU difficulty. This also means new players will have raced through each race environment type once before unlocking this milestone, and can immediately have fun with the other race modes.
The player profile menu is no longer accessed via the top-left profile tile; it now has it's own separate menu button, positioned between the "Watch Replay" and "Options" buttons.
Because the game's performance ratio calculation needs 7 races worth of data before the rolling average can operate correctly, a separate notification now appears if you re-enter the main menu after your save records the 7th completed race.
And that just about covers everything. Along with this new content are plenty of bugfixes too, namely for splitscreen audio as I accidentally broke that in a previous patch without realising. (oops) Happy Rat Racing, and I'll see you all next week in the next Weekly Report!