One more! One more!
When seeing recent videos and streams by players, I had been wondering why everyone was playing the Casual Orb theme. I double-checked if I had accidentally put Casual mode as default mechanic but that was not the case. Finally, on Monday it dawned on me: I messed up the default orb theme. Ooops!
Getting Back Casual Mode (if you want to)
So, this update does something that I usually try to avoid: It overrides one of your settings and restores the default. One reason I feel confident doing that is that several new players were very happy when they finally found out that there is a transparent orb theme with smaller orbs ... something everyone should see first when playing Free Mode.
Now, if you don't know what I'm talking about and want to keep the orb theme you already got used to - don't worry, here's how it works:
In words: Go into Settings, either using the gear icon in Music Library, then Game Settings (bottom left) or by pressing and holding the Menu button for about a second. Then "Style", then "Themes". There on the bottom left, select "Casual". And you're in full Casual mode. We added this because we think for a lot of people, this is actually most fun. Someone also once wrote a negative review because we didn't have that, and that always hurts. Hurt needs to stop, gotta fix it.
Single Laserblade and Dual Wielding
We will soon put laserblades and guns into a kind of skill tree that you'll need to unlock based on your gameplay skill. The reason is because it's an advanced mechanic that can be quite frustrating to new players ... and also because we like letting you progress through the game instead of being immediately overwhelmed with two gazillion game modes and options.
But first, I want to have laserblades and guns completed. This pre-beta version now also lets you play with a single laserblade without having to put one of your controllers down. Here's how you select it:
In single laser blade mode, you can switch your active hand by pulling the trigger for a moment, on the hand that you want to make active. You do not need to swap controllers (which would be hard to do with Touch controllers, anyways).
And if you don't like those silent GIFs and instead want to watch a full session with these settings and a few more - here's to you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UatcqHwKeOs
Be sure to watch it on YouTube or Vimeo because in the descriptions, there are timestamps so you can easily jump to the different sections (this is a really cool feature that both, Vimeo and YouTube have) ... and there's also some more explanation in there.
We also fixed a few more things.
Full Release Notes
- General: Improved tracking of handedness / dominant hand. We now have this as a solid concept and your dominant hand is whichever hand you last used to "interact". Currently, there are two interactions that are tracked for handedness: Skipping and pause (which is most likely the most reliable one), and switching the laser pointer (which is what most people will usually do if handedness was wrong). We needed this as a solid concept for what's coming next.
- Orb Themes: This had the Casual theme as default - not cool. Also, the order of themes wasn't really making much sense. This is fixed. Unfortunately, this will result in the orb theme changing, so we reset everyone's selected theme to the default theme for now. Apologies for the inconvenience.
- Local Music: There was a bug that caused all untagged music to get the same titleForSort, which resulted in all those songs only showing up once. The title for sorting now also uses the fallback so that the title is the full filename. It's still highly recommended to use properly tagged music for Holodance but this makes the behavior a little more acceptable. We'll have file-system based music browsing as an option in the future, for everyone who prefers that way of browsing.
- Mechanic Selection: This was broken for Casual in a V0.9.0a18 version that only went to alphadev. It was also broken for the guns (but those are not functional, yet, anyways). Fixed.
- Laserblades: Completed implementation of single laserblade mechanic. You can switch the laserblade by pulling the trigger on the laserblade you want to use - but it will deactivate the other one unless you have dual wielding active.