Patch Highlights
This patch took us an extra couple of days to get out, because we basically dug into the WHOLE ENTIRE guts of the game, ripped them out, polished them up, and stuck them back in. The previous inner workings of all the game's web technology had taken us just about as far as they could, so it was time to give them a viking's funeral and start fresh. So, what all happened? LET'S TAKE A LOOK!
Expandable Level Cards
We've been trapped inside tiny level cards for too long. Frequently our players have asked us whether they can do this or that with their levels, and our answer has always been, "We'd like to add that feature, but WHERE WOULD WE PUT THAT?" Well, now we have an answer! EXPANDABLE LEVEL CARDS!
You can now click a convenient button on any level card to pop it open and see a whole bunch of new information about the level. We can show stats that previously would have crowded the card, and we can even show a full leaderboard! Oh, and with all this extra space comes room for more buttons.
One of those buttons is a new "Like" button, so you can give props to a level without necessarily keeping it in your favorites list forever! "Likes" were something that wasn't possible given our original infrastructure, but with this new rebuild, IT'S LIKE CITY! And while we were in there, adding new buttons to the level cards, we thought... HEY! Why don't we add...
Level Cloning!
With the new "Clone" button that can be found on your level cards, you can duplicate any old level you've made back into your workshop!
Maybe you had an old level that broke due to a physics change, or perhaps you built a castle-themed level before Spookstone was added to the game. With cloning, you no longer have to sit back and wish you could fix the mistakes of the past! You can copy any of your old levels, and then update their visuals, make sequels, add new concepts or sections, or even add new items that have been added to Levelhead since you last published the level. Do whatever you want! It's your level!
Then, you can publish the clone as a fresh level into the Marketing Department and get all those DELICIOUS PLAYS!
Level Icons
Oh, you may have noticed that there are icons on the level cards! WELL YOU NOTICED CORRECTLY. While we were updating the level cards to have more information, we also wanted to take this opportunity to give creators more expressiveness. So now, in the level details page, you can choose an icon for your level!
We wanted to make sure you could maximally express stuff about your level using these icons, so we made player avatars and level icons pull from the same pool, and we also added a whole bunch of icons to that pool!
Over time, we plan to also add a bunch of unlockable icons to this set, but we think this is a pretty good starting point! Oh, and all old levels have been given random icons. Will those icons make sense for each level? No. No they will not. But they look nice!
Who's following me?
Before I get into this feature, I want to talk a little bit about this big web infrastructure change. Here's the deal! There used to be a whoooole bunch of stuff that only lived in your save file. Stuff like your favorites, what levels you've beaten, and who you are following. Basically, big lists of stuff. With this new patch, we've built systems on the web to handle all those lists. And when you log in to Levelhead, your lists will be pushed up to those new systems, and will no longer live just in your save file.
One of those lists is the list of people you are Following. Because that list will now live on our server, we can also reverse-engineer it and ask our server this question: "Whose Following list am I in?" In other words, who is following me?
YEP, THAT'S RIGHT. Your number of followers isn't just a statistic anymore. You can actually see the list now!
Notification Filtering
Last but not least, the notifications page got a facelift! And a back-lift!
You can now filter notifications by category, and there is a new paging system. You can see 20 notifications at a time, and you can go back as far as... Well, as far as your notifications go!
There is a quirk here, though -- the filtering system only applies to new notifications that were made after this patch. So when you click those filters in the first few days, there may be very few or no notifications in there. Don't worry! It'll all work itself out in the end!
There Will Be Weirdness
This update involved taking a lot of information that the server didn't previously know, and moving it all to the server. That means you're going to see some pretty wacky numbers on certain stats for a while. You'll probably see the number of favorites on your levels drop down at first, as well as your number of followers, and some other stuff, too!
Don't be alarmed! You didn't actually lose any followers, and your levels didn't lose any favorites. Once those people who have favorited your levels or followed you log in after this patch, their data will get synced with the server, and they'll be added back into the counts.
We have also updated how the Level Feed is handled on your profile, so that you can follow as many people as you want. The feed will now only show you new levels published after you started following that person, and after this patch is released. Although this is slightly less cool than having your feed populate with every level of all time made by every person you're following, this change does allow us to totally remove the cap on how many people you can follow. So it's a worthwhile tradeoff!
A Big Thanks!
This kind of huge back-end update is the exact type of stuff that Early Access is for, and we're grateful that our community is so understanding in letting us do this kind of stuff with minimal fuss. It has truly been a blast working on this game up to this point, and it's all thanks to the support our community has given us. You're all the best!
Now, ON TO THE DETAILS!
Levelhead v0.12.6 Patchnotes (since 0.11.1)
See the full patchnotes.
New Features
Web
- Achievement data is now being synced with Rumpus and submitted to Steam. When we get Steam Achievements set up, your progress should automatically be applied to them. There is currently no in-game interface for achievements, but there will be!
- Implemented Discord Rich Presence. If you have Game Activity enabled in Discord, other people in your Discord server can now see what you're up to in game (Workshop, tower trial, playing other people's levels, etc), and your Rich Presence will also display the share code of the level you are currently playing.
Workshop
- Level cards for your own levels now have a "Clone" button. With this button, you can create a duplicate of the level into your workshop that will exist totally separately from the original level. This will allow you to release new versions of old levels, sequels, or variations. You can clone a level as many times as you want.
Editor
- You can now choose an icon for your level in the Level Details page. Level icons pull from the same available pool as player Avatars.
Improvements
Localization
- Implemented new translations for level cards and other new UI elements.
UI
- Added a new round of avatars, bringing the total to 37 (up from 14).
- Updated frame rate counter to use the same font as the rest of the game.
- Added small favorite and like icons to the small versions of Level Cards, so you can easily see whether you have favorited or liked it.
- If you are looking at levels inside the marketing department, they will no longer have their marketing logo displayed, since it's redundant at that point.
- Updated the iconography in the Marketing Department to have clear distinctions between tip amount, wallet amount, and the Exposure Bucks on a level. This iconography will carry forward when we add the ability to tip levels on the level cards.
- The big "Play" or "Download" button on the Level Cards now responds to your mouse when you hover over it.
- Fully rebuilt the Level Cards. They now feature player avatars next to player names, and you can see the actual top score and times. You can also click a "more info" button to expand the level card to get access to additional stats, the full leaderboard (the top 3 spots for both speed and score), the bar graph showing the level's content, and buttons to Favorite or Like the level, plus a new "Follow" button that allows you to follow the level's creator right from the level card itself. Level cards also now feature an icon, which is chosen in the Level Details page of the Editor while building your level. Old levels that were created before icons existed will receive a random icon. This new expanding level card concept paves the way for us to add new ways to interacting with levels, so there will be more changes to come!
- Updated the visuals of the Level Details page and the Tag Selector interface to better match their contexts.
- Updated text in the creator browser to say "Most Playtime Generated" and "Most Plays Generated", to be more clear about what you are sorting by.
- You can now click the large "Followers" button on any Creator Card, and it will not only take you to their profile, but specifically to their list of followers. Note that because of the recent web overhaul, lists of followers will be out of whack for a while.
- When you select a stat link on the profile page, the link is now colored light blue to show it is selected.
- Added player avatars to notifications.
- You can now click the "Followers" button on someone's profile to see who is following them.
- The large, blue stats on profile pages are now links. Some of these, such as "Following", replace the old tab buttons. This also has allowed us to break "Shoes" and "Ribbons" apart into separate categories, so you can just click those links, instead of looking at Ribbons and Shoes combined.
- Fully rebuilt the notifications system to be more reliable, and to allow for filtering and paging in the notifications UI. Notifications created from this point forward should now last about 3 months. Because of a change in notifications infrastructure both in-game and on the web, your old notifications may end up not working properly with filtering. Howver, all new notifications should be fine.
- Stopped truncating numbers in profile stats, so you can see the exact number.
Web
- When you quit the game normally, Rumpus will force-send any lingering changes you have to stats, notifications, etc... to ensure things are up to date.
- Further updated cache management, so your favorites, likes, and following should be EVEN MORE responsive as you modify those lists.
- Used internet magic to speed up level downloads.
- Updated many stat management functions to no longer be handled game side, and are now handled server side. Some examples include how many levels you have published, how many shoes or crowns you have, how many favorites a level has, etc... This will result in some slight delays on seeing stats get updated in certain scenarios (by a few minutes at most), but the stats will be more accurate.
- Added some cache busting to certain activities such as favoriting or playing levels, so that your lists of levels in your profile will be a bit more responsive to changes.
- Fully rebuilt all web functions for searching and storing large lists. Previously, your lists of favorites, play history, who you were following, etc... were all handled locally on your machine. All of these functions have been moved to our server. This allows for following an unlimited number of people, and it also leads to more reliable tracking of play history, which levels you've beaten, etc... This functional overhaul now also paves the way for new web-based features, such as "liking" levels. This change is backwards incompatible with the old "Feed" on your profile page, so you will only see new levels in the feed going forward. When you first log in, you will see a brief pause, during which we are migrating your old data to the server. Note that because of this disruptive change to the game's data structures, if you play on this version of the game, it is highly discouraged to revert back to an older version. Also, some stats connected to these will be out of sync for a while, until we fully migrate everything over.
- Subscription notifications should now come through in the correct order, and not in huge batches.
Audio
- Reduced the volume of Lockswitches triggering.
Visuals
- Burny Whirlers now have red fireballs. This is to bring them in line with fireballs that come out of cannons, so that we can begin to introduce different types of fire that has different effects.
Gameplay
- Flipwips will once again attack as normal while invisible (due to being behind an enclosure), but their tongues will always be visible.
Editor
- Added to the name combobulator: Apologies, Meh.
- Added glowing grid lines around the player cursor in the editor. It just looks cool.
- Added a green checkmark icon to the Sign. (thanks to Oopyerchie Landjunk)
Fixes
Editor
- Fixed an issue in the Level Details page that could cause a crash related to the new influx of avatars.
- Cheese mode now no longer allows you to touch the goal without carrying package, for consistency! (thanks to Kammaie Sapnarka)
- When dragging an object around that has a key inside it, the key should now be drawn the proper gold color.
- Fixed an issue where the new level details page would crash after an alt-tab.
- Fixed an issue with the Finalize Level Details page that would cause your cursor to disappear if you attempted to change the level's icon.
- Fixed some spacing issues on the new Level Details page in Low Calorie UI mode.
- When you exit out of the Level Details page without hitting the check mark, the level's name should now properly be reset to what it was.
UI
- If you "X" out of the avatar picker in the profiles page, it will now properly cancel your icon selection. To confirm your icon selection, the checkmark will now work as intended!
- When you click the "Ship it!" button on the scoreboard, the "Ship it!" button will longer move 10 pixels to the side.
- When you entered a level and went back to the tower, the level duration dropdown menu was not having its state preserved. Now it is!
- When you favorite or like a level in its expanded level card mode using the large buttons, the tiny versions of those buttons should also update (and vice versa). (thanks to cprice)
- If you are offline and you click the Feedbag button, you will get a popup that says you are offline, instead of being walked through the tagging process and then having the whole thing fail when you go to the browser.
- Fixed some potential future text overflow issues when displaying stats on level cards in other languages.
- Fixed text overflow issues with long names in the Tower Trial.
- Fixed some language spacing issues with the Chinese font in the notifications page.
- Fixed some jittery movement on the text for the stats on Level Cards while scrolling.
- The "Refresh Bookmarks" button will no longer weirdly be floating over the Avatar Picker UI.
- You can now use the controller's "B" button (or "A" on a Switch controller) to exit the Rumpus login menu area.
- Fixed a typo on the Rumpus login page after creating an account via Steam.
- Workshop items will no longer display a "!" next to them. This is a legacy UI element from when items were unlocked via the campaign.
- The "Report Player" and "Give Feedback" buttons were horizontally aligned on the profiles page, when they should be vertically aligned. This has been fixed.
- When you follow or unfollow someone, you will see their correct avatar appear in the on-screen notification.
- When playing levels from your Notifications page, the game will no longer think you are playing those levels in a playlist.
- Fixed an issue with the exclamation mark on the bookmarks button in the Profiles page being on the wrong side.
Crash
- Fixed an issue with Rumpus initialization.
Gameplay
- Sometimes, when powerups were moving through solids after emerging from a Prize Block, they would skip over open spaces and keep going through solids. This should no longer be happening.
- If a Blaster emerges through the ground due to being on a path and is touching GR-18 the whole time, the blaster will now correctly pick up GR-18. (thanks to Crushnoil Varkzapee)
- The package should no longer trigger levers that it was already touching after a checkpoint respawn. (thanks to Tim Conceivable)
- Slightly tweaked the Grabber logic to reduce the chance of being able to grab an item diagonally through solids.
- Flipwips that are invisible due to being hidden behind Enclosures will no longer invisibly lick GR-18 to death.
- Batteries should no longer be pulled into Charge Switches while the game is paused. This scenario was also causing the game to unleash a torrent of squealing demonic sounds, which should now also be fixed.
- Fixed some physics issues that would cause kicked objects to get stuck in walls. (thanks to Tim Conceivable)
Visuals
- Updated the Burny Whirler fireballs to use the same image as Cannon Fireballs. Also, if a Burny Whirler is not moving, its fireballs will always be oriented so their fire goes upward.
Audio
- Fixed an issue where Lizumis would sometimes continually play a tire screeching sound once they went off screen.
Web
- When you play a published level, the game now double checks upon level load to ensure you have up-to-date leaderboards and other level data. This should prevent the scenario where you see someone steal your leaderboard spot via a notification, but when you play the level, it shows you still at the top of the leaderboard. This was occurruing due to the level's data not being updated upon load.
- When you inspect a level card, we now send an "info retriever" to query whether you are following the creator of the level, so the "Follow" button on a level card should now be accurate.
- If you quickly log in and out between different Rumpus accounts, your notifications page should now show the correct user's notifications.
- The "Follow" button on a user's profile should now properly update its state when you download fresh profile information from them.
- Fixed some legacy issues with displaying your lists of favorites, play history, etc... from before the web migration.
- The game client no longer runs counters for things like Shoes, Crowns, or Published Levels. Tracking these stats is now the job of the server.
- Fixed some paging issues in the "Least Played" and "Hardest" filter options in the Tower.