Polish that stuff!
Another week, another dev blog! At least, I think it's been another week. The calendar says so, but my body says no.
We've been hard at work getting the game ready for launch, and we're happy to announce that we are closing in fast on a REAL, OFFICIAL LAUNCH DATE! Lots of work goes into a launch like this, ranging from various bug fixes, optimizations, and polish points, all the way to marketing, meetings, cutting trailers, and figuring out how to get the word out.
Aside from all that, this past week we've been building up prototypes of the full tutorial that we'll be adding for 1.0, and we have reworked some of the multiplayer controller UX issues. So let's talk about that!
Up until now, on desktop, we've had it set up so that pressing "Start" was the way you disconnect a controller. This meant that "Start" couldn't be used on most interfaces, and it also meant that Player 2-4 would sometimes disconnect themselves when trying to do other things, like pause the game. This also led to some other, even more esoteric problems, like us not having enough hotkeys available in the editor for all the tools.
And even worse, if you added or removed a controller during gameplay, the level would restart, since you'd changed the number of players! So this week, we've solved all these problems with a whole new Multiplayer manager popup.
You can use this popup to add or remove controllers at will, and the game won't auto-restart your level until you've finally settled on how many players you want. If the level is going to restart, you'll get a warning message.
Freeing up "Start" from being the "Disconnect Controller" button has made that button available in the Editor, which had a cascading effect and allowed us to revisit the control schema in there, getting hotkeys for all the tools.
This is one of those seemingly smallish things that can create a huge bunch of annoyances and cascading problems for lots of people, so we'll be happy to have this problem behind us!
Once this is done, we'll be going full blast into the BRAND NEW TUTORIAL, and then it will be on to some final scalability updates, optimization, bug fixes, and any final polish points before launch.
WE'RE ON THE HOME STRETCH! See you next week!