Last Orders' launch was... lackluster, to say the least. A lot of this can be put on the failure of the YouTube video I made to promote it, and the failure of that can be put on it just... not being very good. But, nonetheless, I can't pin it all on marketting.
As a game, the release version of Last Orders was a bit rough around the edges. Excluding the various bugs (there were lots), the fundamental gameplay was lacking in an insentive for players to engage with the game's systems. Last Orders functions as a social sandbox, for players to get their friends together and have a laugh together about the inherently silly nature of the game. However, to get to that point, you actually have to do stuff.
When I was testing this was easy enough, since I made the game. I could quite easily point people and the right direction and be like "hey this is funny". I thought that people would organically discover stuff like this for themselves; and maybe they would have, if more people had given it a try. That did not happen, though. Very few people played Last Orders. The ones that did had no reason to stick around long enough to 'find the fun'. My solution is this:
The Queen & Country Update
This update introduces a radically new approach to the main game flow. Previously, players are dropped into the pub for an indefinite period to just mess around. This can be fun, but leads to all the issues mentioned above.
Now, the game operates on a ten minute time limit. Each player is given a set of tasks to complete (e.g, finish some number of drinks, dance with some number of fellow patrons, the like), and a grade according to how well they achieve these tasks. At the end of the game, every player's grade is revealed along with an average for the whole lobby, with some flavourtext rewarding you for good scores and berating you for poor scores. This encourages players to interact with the mechanics, as well as introducing a level of depth and stategy in how you choose to approach the tasks. If you want a perfect grade, you will have to be very careful about how you go about it, or you can just mess around and only pay cursory attention to your tasks and probably still get a passing grade.
Also, to further flesh out the world, I have added a series of special 'quest NPCs', where players are tasked with helping out patrons of the bar, for which they may be rewarded with money or special items. There are currently five quest NPCs that will spawn across all three maps:
This is an adult man. He has unfortunately lost his ID. If you buy him a beer, he will pay you and ask you to find him a fake ID so he can enjoy the full pub experience. To source a fake ID, you will have to talk to...
This is the illegal items vendor. He won't trust you at first, but if you bring somebody over to him and knock them out, he will reveal a selection of illegal items that provide different status effects, and a fake ID you can use to help out the adult man.
This is a photographer. You will find him standing adrift, having lost his camera battery, which is hidden in some crevice of the pub. If you find the battery and give it to him, he will follow you around and take photos of you. Or, you can beat him up and take his camera and take the photos yourself. Any photos taken will be stored on your machine in a temporary folder and you will be able to choose at the end of a round which photos to keep and which to discard.
This guy has lost his wallet containing his universal credit payment. Oh no! If you find it, you can give it back to him to complete the quest and get some money back as a reward... Or just take the money. He will be none the wiser.
Finally, this is a very strong man. It's sort of a mini-boss. He is so strong that he has become depressed for being physically incapable of losing a fight. If you manage to beat him, he will feel ALIVE and reward you with some cash.
That's the main new content. But, I've made a host of other changes behind the scenes, including a new intro video which hints at the ridiculously stupid lore I came up with for this game because it is funny.
The full changelog is as follows:
- new dance
- fixed back button in menus
- fixed speech bubbles occluding mouse click preventing accessing options menu tabs
- third person view while dancing
- moved 2 gambling machines upstairs on City so NPCs will go upstairs
- fixed money not spawning on death
- more stable fade in fade out
- characters no longer get stuck on other characters heads
- spectator camera added when you die without respawning (e.g at end-game period)
- fixed bugs with exiting lobbies and such
- fixed npcs not gambling
- tightened NPC obstacle avoidance to stop them tweaking out whenever theres another character within a billion miles of them
- slightly increased avatar move speed
- fixed gambling odds that made jackpots astronomically rare
- fixed incorrect blood particle placement
- fixed crash related to voice chat when creating/joining a new lobby after already entering a game.
- quickplay will now check you are on the same version as the host before letting you join a lobby
- fixed red wine material always showing full
- spin jump attack is now fully predicted, meaning it will handle much smoother on non-host clients.
- added £100 and £500 money drop to avoid insane amounts of physics objects if you die with a lot of money
- decreased despawn time on avatar ragdolls due to physics-related performance concerns
- decreased forward attack force to stop characters absolutely teleporting all over the places during fights
- added 10 new Steam achievements