Good to see you!
After a couple of months in closed alpha, our page is live! Oh, the usual #smallIndieCo, living the dream, working in our basements, eating pasta. This is going to be our first Steam release and there's a lot to learn, but we're having fun and we hope so will you!
Build 0.6.2.1
we're grabbing your nickname from steam now; removed the username input in main menu
added look ahead camera, you'll see more towards the direction that you're moving in
increased character size and all related effects by 10% while keeping the world and camera zoom as it was before
added Last Minute Pawn Shop
updated dancing lights feature - the effect is way stronger now
the settings for dancing lights now let you pick exactly how strong you want them to be, it used to be a sort of on/off before
fixed a bug where lights sensitivity slider wouldn't load from preferences in future sessions
fixed some controller D-Pad UI navigation bugs
Last Minute Pawn Shop
One minute before round timer ends, the pawn shop opens. It will buy all of your leftover products:
one product at a time
it offers you a different price per transaction, between 50-90% of the initial product value - you can go in/out a few times if you don't like the offer
it buys from your lowest to the highest product tier - so if you have a lot of inventory and wanna recoup that expensive chip that didn't sell, you're in for a couple of trades before the game ends
there's no special terms or transaction limits other than be nice to each other; I'm sure that won't be a problem!
In our playtests some players would give up towards the end game, if they were too far ahead or behind. We did hide the score during the game in 0.6.1.3 (while keeping leaderboard visible) and this complements it even further. We also had requests in the past for unsold inventory to be counted towards the final score, this addresses that issue too. It offers a bit of variety towards the end, where you have a choice between completing a few more quests, getting rid of your inventory or block your friends from doing so, for one last leaderboard change.
This is a WIP feature; thank you Dracusor for the Pawn Shop idea. While at it, thank you to all of our alpha participants that keep coming up with good suggestions.
Short Term Plans
Finish Last Minute Pawn Shop
Fly High Runners TV - an in-game broadcast system with multiple purposes: a series of short tutorials, tips and tricks, replacement leaderboard/winner photo in the lobby, and maybe a place to display other types of information in the future
Toast Notification System - we need to explain PowerUp pickups a bit better and while at it, we can make a general notifications system that can be used for other in game events (eg. The Pawn Shop just opened)
Longer Term Plans
Add some launch pads towards the edges of the map that throw you back towards the city center with a bit of randomness to it. You often get punished for delivering towards the edges, since you'll be far away from anything else that might spawn next
Make the characters blend in better with the city - feedback from Ubu, ty. Be it lightning, shaders, weather effects. It's something we'll have to look into as we polish our demo more
Add TEAM mode; this has been discussed a couple of times in the last few months and we already have an idea of how we want to approach it
More polish, MORE! on all fronts. And squash ALL the bugs!
Demo release
Our plan is to release a public demo this winter and take it from there. In the meantime, we do run playtests on our discord, so feel free to join and participate in the next one. Maybe we'll even start broadcasting our playtests on Steam.
On behalf of our team (Jamayk, RustyStorm & MrPhilipJoel), I thank for your attention and see ya next time!