We're Back!
WHOA. That was quite the break! Although it has been 3 weeks since the last Dev Blog, we've only had a couple full days of development, on account of 3/5 of our studio being gone most of that WHOOOLE time! Still, we are on track to deploy the next patch on Wednesday, December 18, and we've managed to squeeze in some nice updates in just the couple of days we've had since the last dev blog. So let's take a look!
Boombox Updates!
Generally, our player community has been... mixed... on Boomboxes. Although they're cool conceptually and people like the idea of them, their implementation has made it more difficult than necessary to make cool music. So in this patch, we're working on some nice updates to Boomboxes that will make them much easier to use.
You can now set a Boombox's "Beats Per Minute", as well as how many beats its note lasts, and you can make it repeat on a beat count, too! This should make it far easier to turn your favorite songs into Boombox songs, since you no longer have to try to convert beats into seconds on your own.
We have some other potential updates in the works for Boomboxes, but we'll keep those a surprise!
Fancy Settings!
I had mentioned in the last Developer blog that we've been doing some work on the game's interfaces to make them more cohesive and stylish. Just yesterday, we finalized some updates to the Settings page. Let's take a look!
We've even broken everything down into categories, so you can say goodbye to scrolling for 10,000 years of pain just to find the setting you want! Oh, and we have added a handful of new settings that have been requested for quite some time, like being able to have the Editor not spawn the default level template.
Launch Plans: Levelhead will Sim-Ship on Mobile
Up until now, our Levelhead launch plans have been to simultaneously launch on Steam (PC/Mac), Nintendo Switch, and Xbox (with Game Pass). And then, at some later date, we would launch on Mobile.
On Monday this week, we sat down to go over those plans, and whether we thought they made sense and gave the game the biggest chance of making an impact. After some deliberation, we had to ask the question: Why not launch on Mobile simultaneously with everything else? We think Levelhead has the capacity to make a huge splash on Mobile, because there simply won't be any other game like it out there. There are some design and business hurdles we'll have to jump over to achieve this, but as it turns out, we are much closer to clearing those than we had originally thought.
So it's now official: We will be simultaneously shipping on six platforms: Steam (PC/Mac), Nintendo Switch, Xbox (with Game Pass), Windows Store (with Game Pass), iOS, and Android. This is pretty atypical; most games will launch on one platform first, then, many months later, they will launch on another, and then another, etc... So you might be asking: "Launching on six platforms at once? Who does that?" We do. We do that. And we think that by having the game available literally everywhere all at once, we will give it the biggest chance of accumulating an absolutely massive following right out of the gate.
We also plan for all platforms to have full cross-platform features. Any level made on any platform should be playable on any other platform, and you will be able to bring your user data across all your devices.
We'll have more information about the mobile version of Levelhead in the near future!
And last, you're probably wondering: When is the launch date? WELL.. We don't know yet. We have about 30 ducks we have to get into a row before we can say for sure, and you know what they say about ducks. They're wily.
Levelhead is in IndieDB's Top 100 Indie Games of 2019!
Last but not least... Levelhead is in IndieDB's Top 100 Indie Games of 2019! That puts us in the voting pool for the top 10, so if you haven't already, come express your love for Levelhead by giving us some votes!
What's Next?
The next patch is planned for December 18, one week from today! So get ready to... uh.. You know. Reboot your Steam client or whatever! And that's all we have for you this week. I have to get back to programming!
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.