Smoother Sessions
This one is mostly under the hood: performance has been massively smoothed out in the Song Selection scene and hitches during gameplay should be reduced if not gone altogether on most machines.
Instrument Heat and note counts filling in on the grid should interrupt you less.
In-game, the first combo bump and the first hit sparks should land cleaner instead of hitching the frame.
If you’ve been feeling little stutters in those spots, this is the change that fixes that.
Options
A couple of new knobs:
Enable On-Screen Crowd (Gameplay) -- on by default. Turn it off if you’d rather keep the stage to yourself.
Player Joined Session Notification (Audio → Online Notifications) -- volume for the sound a host hears when someone joins the lobby, separate from the rest of the SFX mix.
Fixes and Changes
On the results breakdown, a handful of Goods or Bads no longer show up as empty dashes.
World Tour Progress
There's no devlog this week as I've been spending a lot of time working on getting an artist to create character portraits instead of using the placeholder stuff I had in before.
In terms of functionality I've implemented the traits system, so bandies can now have specialized traits that change the way they play in game.
I've also mapped out exactly what the vertical slice will deliver. This vertical slice will be released well before the 1.0 version next year and will serve as a way for me to get World Tour in your hands earlier so I can gather feedback (plus it should just be fun!)
No ETA on when that will drop. Stay tuned!
As always, keep jammin~
Frank, Restless Games