Holodance Alpha 53 was a pretty big and awesome update. To play all currently available content of Holodance, you now need to spend at least about two hours with the game (if you are really good with rhythm games and unlock each track the first time you play it). To master it will take you much longer ;-)
Unfortunately, we pushed it live the day we had to move out of our old office and the day before my vacation ... and in the middle of shooting the Holodance Alpha 53 Gameplay Teaser I noticed a super-annoying bug that caused Holodance enter a "dead state" during startup that made the music not start playing and consequently caused a bug when trying to enter a level.
So, if you ran into that bug, you were stuck. Unless you knew the workaround.
Fortunately, Steam has a "beta-branch" feature so from home, the night before our flight to Seattle, I moved Alpha 53 to the beta-branch (that I had just created), and Alpha 52 back to the default branch. That way, people would have to opt-in to Alpha 53, hopefully after reading the information about the startup bug and how to workaround this issue.
The story is longer (new office has terrible Internet connection, cause of bug was comparatively easy to find but not easy to fix) but today, we celebrate the release of this new version with previews for Levels 6, 10 and 11 to all branches with Alpha 54.
Here's what has changed between Alpha 53 and Alpha 54:
- Fixed "The Nasty Alpha 53 Bug": Changed all audio clips to no longer "Preload Audio Data". This changed the loading time for the music of the level selection scene from 12.2 seconds to 0.65 seconds. The reason the music did not start was that I previously had a timeout after 10 seconds, so when loading took longer than 10 seconds, it simply gave up. This fix, of course, also reduces memory consumption of audio files (but audio files didn't have a particularly intense footprint, anyways, there's other optimizations in the pipeline with much greater effect concerning memory usage).
- Fixed an issue in Level 1: The minimum time between two notes was set too high, so some notes were missed, resulting in music and gameplay no longer matching perfectly (that was in the part with the rather fast blue notes near the end of the song - the music goes "dididi-dididididi", the orbs were kind of like "di-di-didi-didi" ;-) ).
- The orb generator for the bassline track in Level 2 used "Sequence" instead of "Melody" for orb placement, so while the rhythm was perfectly matched, the melody really wasn't. Fixed. As a side-note: Sequence is really useful for instruments like a kickdrum, where each beat has the same note, so without this, you'd get each orb in the same location. For any melodic instruments, using this really can be considered a bug.
- Removed "Prototype" tag from Level 3. While there are still known issues with Level 3 (skipping does not work, yet, Apastarrr sometimes ends up in the middle of the play area; he doesn't say anything in the beginning after the first track was unlocked), that level is way beyond "prototype-stage".
- "Spoiler Levels" can now be unlocked individually so that you can play the actual progression through the levels instead of getting all instruments immediately.
- Integrated updated versions of the environments for Level 1, 3, 6 and 7; these have several fixes and improvements compared to the old versions and are pretty much "final" (except for major performance improvements and minor polishing)
- Fixed balancing: Track 2 of Level 6 could not be completed successfully because the score per successful arc was too low (compared to the minimum score to pass that track)
And known issues you should be aware of in Alpha 54:
- The first instrument track of Level 6 is a little sparse in the beginning (i.e. there's no notes you could catch for 10 or 20 seconds) ... this is kind of nice because it lets you look around the environment but will eventually be fixed by adding some notes because people might think there's something broken there