You heard that right, person who probably owns a Vive and is therefore reading the update info for a Vive-exclusive game, PowersVR is now on the Oculus Rift too! Thanks to the awesome people at Oculus, I was sent a free Rift with Touch controllers, and thanks to the awesome people at Epic Games integrating the new headset within Unreal Engine 4 has been a breeze.
With this update I'm not only trying to bring the game to more people (we just hit 800 players by the way, yay), but also continuing my efforts to improve
the new player experience. And finally some changes to make sure people get the new powers they've earned.
A couple of weeks ago I also opened a survey asking players how the game should develop according to them. Now I think it's time we close the ballots, with almost 300 submissions, I think I have a pretty clear idea of what people wanna see. I've included a graph of the results at the bottom of this update, and some comments on it too, but before that, the patch notes:
Oculus Rift
* The Oculus Rift headset and Touch controllers are now supported in PowersVR
* The game will now automatically detect which headset you're playing with and change the control instructions model based on it
General
* Control explanation kiosks have been reworked
- Now a prompt asks players to hold their hand over the kiosk, which turns the hand into a controller
with controls for the currently equipped power written instead of the nearby one
* Improved effects on kiosks
* Fixed a bug where the arrows indicating you have another page of powers were hidden
* Fixed a bug that allowed changing the power current page, even if you didn't have a second one
* Many older chunks of code have been refactored making them much easier to work with, speeding up dev time
Challenges
* Fixed an issue that prevented challenges where a lower score was better (time-based) from giving away a reward
* The game now examines all challenge highscores on startup, and will unlock heroes that were supposed to be earned, but weren't for some reason
The Witch (Telekinesis):
* Additional graphical improvements
The patch notes aren't too long this time around, but the changes are quite substantial. Anyhow, on to the survey!
A big thank you to everyone who participated, the information and suggestion has been invaluable. A lot of people decided to take advantage of the open feedback textbox, and gave me great insight into how others experience the game.
Let's talk about the results a little, my original intention with the survey was to learn what new superpowers people wanted to see in the game, but despite the many suggestions and recommendations, new powers and challenges are the thing people are least excited about, followed by an expansion of the sandbox, which will happen as more powers and enemies are added.
As expected the story mode is the primary interest for people, which is good, because after the 0.3.0 update, that's where all of my efforts will go for a long while. Powers such as Gravity Manipulation, Ice control and Electric bursts are going to make their way into the game in the near future, while things like Archery and Animal Control will probably wait for a while.
Another important thing to note is that combat gameplay trump the other two options by quite a bit, so a big focus on AI is also slated for the next couple of months.
Overall the data is pretty self-explanatory and will serve me well to plan the next updates. Thank you for reading and thank you for playing.