Hey, Levelheads! It's another week, and another dev blog! We are still TWO weeks out from the next patch (November 6). We've made a lot of progress this week, but there's still more to go! Let's take a look!
FixFest 2019: Phase 2
If you take a peek at the patch notes, you might notice a pattern -- MORE FIXES! As we shift our eye toward quality, we've been hard at work patching all the hundreds of tiny little issues that we've let sit for far too long. We've got gameplay fixes, editor fixes, optimizations, web fixes -- you name it, we've got it! We're even fixing things that aren't yet broken, but will definitely be broken later on if we don't patch them up now.
Fixes are the unglamorous side of game development. But like many unglamorous jobs, if someone doesn't do them, you'll notice. Much like plowing the snow off a road, we have to get these things out of the way so we can go faster later.
Platform Streamlining
As we work on preparing Levelhead to go through Cert for Xbox and Switch, we've had to put quite a bit of time into lots of little interesting tweaks to make sure the game runs well on these platforms. These are things you might not even think of, and which often have positive effects on other platforms as well. The biggest of these are the optimizations, and improvements to our Rumpus systems. We have plenty more work to go, but we're making good headway in this department!
What's Next?
Now that we're out of the first two weeks of the patch cycle and have a big batch of fixes and improvements locked in, we can put a little more time into some new features before the patch drops on November 6th. Although most of our focus in this phase is on stability and not new features, we get just as excited as you all do about fun new toys added to the game, so of course we'll have a few of those.
We're continuing to beef up the campaign, and we have a couple of other item changes planned that should add some fun and interesting logic functionality to your levels, too, but they're still under way. What could they be? ONLY TIME WILL TELL!
New Item Preview: Jinglebox
Before I leave you this week, I'd like to give a little teaser of the new item hinted at last week. We call it a "Jinglebox!"
Fat Bard has created some fun new "stingers" or "jingles" -- small bursts of musical flair. Jingleboxes play these Jingles when activated by a switch. Do you want to emphasize that a player did something good? Or perhaps amplify the surprise of a grand reveal? Jingleboxes have you covered!
We'll have more info about Jingleboxes in the full patch update on November 6th!
You just gotta get in there!
Want to stay tuned with updates in CLOSE TO REAL TIME? Check out our patch notes page to see changes to the game, even before they have hit Steam!
And if you want to get the changes a little earlier than the rest of the folks on Steam, hop into our Discord, where we've got information on getting into the Beta branch.
Catch you next week!