After we demoed Holodance to about 140 at an event last Thursday, we got very busy getting this next release ready. In Alpha 51, we had one very nasty bug where you could get stuck in Level 2 when you had Level 3 already unlocked and played again. We also got some nice feedback of which we already have some implemented, some will be implemented with Alpha 53, and some later.
EDIT: I've also created a little video to highlight some of the changes in this release. The quality of the video isn't great, sorry, but I hope it's still useful: Holodance Alpha52 Video Release Notes
So once again, here's the long list of changes in this update:
- Content-Update: We now have a completely new version of the environment of the water-level (Level 3), which is fairly close to the final version! Also, the new version of Level 1 is now available in all quality settings.
- Added much improved audio-feedback for the timing of each note: Perfect (note time +/- 0.04s) is the old hihat sound, still catching the note (> 0.04s but < 0.08s) triggers a lower sound which is played backwards in the case that the note was caught too early; > 0.08s but still caught: two more sounds, again backwards if caught too early, and the "not caught" sound stays the same, as well as the "lost multiplier" sound
- Fixed Bug where Vayusah got stuck when completing any track in Level 2 after already having completed the track
- Changed color of Orb for Snares in Level 2 for better visibility (it’s now purple instead of Yellow); also changed minimum size to be larger so the Orbs don’t get as small as they did before
- Disabled skipping through intro in Level 1 via Menu and Grip buttons (this was never documented and frequently pressed accidentally in demos and probably also by players)
- Added a generic skipping method: When skipping (e.g. through voice acting) is available, when you press the Trigger on either controller, it will start vibrating and a progress bar will appear; after one second, you skip to the next available skip point; implemented for Level 1 (two skip points: first is dragon immediately lands and greets you, so you can skip the intro flight; second is skipping the whole tutorial and going right to the high five to start the song)
- Re-introduced "stroke to repeat" in Level 1, with the voice fix (so you can actually hear what the dragon says), and after stroking the dragon, you now also need to use the new skip-functionality, otherwise, you'll go back to the level selection scene, as usual
- Added Skipping Points to Level 2; you can now skip out of the level right after the song is complete, should be able to skip the initial intro, and also skip out of the intro when first unlocking the second track (when you skip immediately after the first track, you back into the level selection scene, when you skip later, when the explanation has already started, you skip right into selecting a track)
- Removed the little crosses from the platform the player stands on
- Improved how voice-acting is handled to prevent a dragon saying two different things at the same time
- Improved bonus for velocity and angular velocity: Instead of using the current velocity on impact, the maximum velocity since the last impact is used. This encourages fast movement between catching orbs and also works when stopping right when you hit the orb (which is what drummers would often do)
- Fixed a bug that prevented notes that were caught too early from being properly registered (instead of being stopped, turning grey and falling down, they simply went right through the controller)
- Fixed wrong calculation for time offset (this did not have any noticeable effect in the game but would have caused trouble with new features)
- Fixed bug where sometimes, the location of the offset time indicator would be shown out of the ScoreHUD (left / right of the ScoreHUD)
- Scaled particles effects on orb impact (currently only active on 980 Ti, but you can switch them on on any quality level) based on timing offset: The better your timing, the larger and longer the particles; if you're very offbeat, the particles are scaled down and made fairly small
- Scaled impact effect of particles (that's a little flash) based on velocity bonus, so the faster you had moved your controller, the bigger the flash
- Increased maximum allowed off time from 0.06s to 0.08s which lets you catch orbs much earlier and much later and still get some score
- Refactored how VR UIs are handled - up until now, this was done in a rather distributed way that created a lot of potential for errors; now it's a nice system with one centralized VR UI manager, and individual watchers that collaborate with that VR UI manager but are nicely decoupled ... so it's fairly easy now to have any number of VR UIs, as well as companion Window UIs and make sure it all works well
- Added Settings (that were previously only available outside VR on the companion screen until now) to Level Selection Scene
- Added "help screen" that shows the score hud - point at any area or icon to read a description of this part of the HUD; this is not the final version of this - but it should help quite a bit already ...
- Added Pause Game, activated by pressing the trigger for one second while playing (Pause is only available while you're playing a song - you can still always pause the game by activating the SteamVR Dashboard); you can pause without penalty three times each session - when you pause more often, your score is reduced to 80% each time you pause once more; this is to prevent a cheat that you could apply by pausing before each orb ...
- Added Pause screen that lets you do several things: Cancel this session, calibrate player height, switch between "Zen" and "Gamer" modes, Activate/Deactivate Particle Effects (you cannot change the main quality level here because that restarts the game, which is something you usually don't want to happen while playing a session)
- Removed the annoying 3-seconds delay after each song
- Added some player statistics to settings screen
- Added accumulated highscore that keeps track of every play session and adds the score per play session
- Increased base score per orb; this was necessary because we had a bug in the previous version that added too much score per orb
- Increased head bonus score
- Fixed a bug where the start position of Vayusah would get more and more offset each time you enter the level when Level 3 is already available
- Fixed Bug: Activating SteamVR Dashboard broke particle effects in Level Selection Scene
- Fixed Bug: Sporadically, the movement of the dragon (from which direction the orbs were arriving, and where on the platform they were arriving) did stay static; this now always properly works
- Did some performance adjustments, in particular for Level 3, this now has 3 versions with varying quality levels, the 970 version should run fairly well
- The 970 quality setting now has the platform opaque instead of transparent - this may also help people that have a few of heights ... and it helps with performance on the 970