What's up killers! Today I'm extremely pleased to announce Death Game's biggest update ever. If you just want game news, skip to the bottom for the full changelog. Let's talk about the big stuff:
- Full Steam Workshop support. You can now upload AND easily update levels, which can be downloaded and played with a single click! (Steam customers only, ItchIO buyers still must exchange levels manually)
- New block types: Jump (Ends the level), Moneybag (Gain points and compare your score!)
- Full game UI overhaul. Play levels in campaign mode, quickly open levels in the editor! New, pretty buttons and text!
- Better game accessibility: Campaigns and (almost) all text are fully translated, and the campaign mode now includes captions for other languages or hard of hearing players!
- Editor overhaul: Name objects inside the editor, full level creation is now completely possible without editing the .d4h file! Also now multiple control methods, helper scripts, and non-destructive preview with 'P'!
- Completely new Modifier system. Access to game engine features, allowing for extremely complicated mechanisms, mechanics, and unique level looks! You can now play with no gravity, or make level objects invisible, and much more!
- Official documentation: Death Game wiki now included with the game. Includes many mechanics as well as how to use them in your levels!
- New translations! Death Game has now been professionally translated to Spanish, Russian and Chinese!
- Achievements! Share your progress with friends, and brag about rare achievements.
There's so, so much to talk about with this update, but I don't want this post to be several pages long, so I'll just leave you with the changelog. And finally, some other news: Death Game+ has now been renamed to Death Game. This will be news to a lot of players, but Death Game+ originally launched with a free version, named Death Game, which was lacking quite a few features. However, response was drastically higher for the paid version, so the free version was eventually discontinued. Now, I've finally merged the two together, so will now refer to it as the simpler "Death Game". For purely mechanical reasons, some things, like SteamDB will still refer to Death Game in the old way. Thanks for reading! Here's the changes:
-I found one of the recent updates really screwed up level loading from the buttons on the menu. That's fixed now. As an aside, level loading is smoother than it's ever been.
-Finally fixed the titlescreen level bug. That's forever gone. With a specific keypress combo, it was possible to load levels into the titlescreen. Funny! but had to go.
-Added a new block type, Jumps! Jumps are used in campaign mode to 'jump' to the next level without reaching a win state. In both editor and campaign modes, they also delete any AI who touch them.
-Added a end of level timer, which will round to two decimal places. This will allow players to race and compare times.
-You also now get a notification and time taken message when beating the campaign. This will make full speedruns easier.
-Fixed a bug to do with not setting text names correctly when stored as a temp level
-Stairstep logic is now much smoother on ramps.
-Dead people can now be thrown by pistons. Why? cause it sounded funny.
-You can now earn money in the campaign, which is now displayed at the end of every level.
-New block type, MoneyBag! You can now find these pickups in levels to gain an extra $100 in campaign mode. They're also place-able in the level editor, so your workshop levels can compare scores!
-You can now edit text types directly in game.
-The level editor now doesn't accept input while you're in a menu.
-Changed 'rot' in the editor UI to 'Rotation'.
-Added a button to display editor controls
-Slight UI changes on the editor
-Fixed a bug that caused translation to sometimes not show in other scenes, like the editor or campaign.
-Added professional translation of Chinese, Spanish, and Russian to the game.
-3D (non UI, world text) is now also properly translated in some cases.
-The Campaign now has captions, mostly added for the benefit of non-english languages.
-Your last selected language now loads more smoothly on boot. Basically, I've removed the need to press a button twice, which was a bug earlier.
-Death Game+ now includes Steam Workshop support, when launched through steam. Automatically download your subscribed levels, and upload your levels to steam in a single button press under the "Custom Content" screen.
-You can now play custom levels in the 'campaign' mode. at some point I disabled this feature due to load instability, but in theory it should be buttery smooth now.
-You can now hold "Left Alt" in the custom content panel to instead load a level in the editor.
-Player and Enemy movement is now framerate dependant. To be honest, I'm shocked and embarrassed that the game has managed this long without this feature. I only now noticed it watching new gameplay from a computer far better than mine. Oof. Oof.
-fixed a bug to do with incorrectly crediting a win on a loss. (oops!)
-There's now more 'fortune' random messages on the titlescreen.
-Levels will now load without requiring names for certain objects. Now the system can give a name to any object, and will ignore it if a object has no name written. This was neccessary for some changes in how levels are loaded, while still maintaining compatability with older levels.
-New block type! Modifiers! This block is not exposed in the level editor, because it's very technical and I considered it for the best only power users have access to it. By editing a level file, and changing a block type to "Modifier", you can now spawn it. Modifiers are changed by using the object name, in the format of (), so for example hide is typed as "Hide(myHiddenPlayer)". I don't really recommend anyone who hasn't spent some time with Unity to use Modifiers, as there's quite a bit more complexity than I can list here to your interactions.
-New Modifier Action: Trigger. This action finds any named objects, and changes their collision type to "trigger". This means a block for example, will lose collision and become passable.
-New Modifier Action: Hide. This action finds any named objects, and disables its sprite. This makes the object invisible, and allows for, for example, invisible buttons.
-New Modifier Action: Disable. This action finds any named objects, and disables them in the Unity Hierarchy. The only real use for this is in conjunction with buttons or gates, to allow an object to start disabled on level load. Additionally, Modifiers can only interact with enabled objects (active in the Unity Hierarchy), so using the disable action will have to be the last interaction with an object.
-New Modifier Action: Rotator. This action finds any named objects, and adds a slow rotation script to them. This allows for slight animation and moving levels.
-New Modifier Action: Parent. This action finds any named objects, and makes them children of another named object, inheriting rotation and scale changes. This changes the name! So it'll be very hard to run modifers on an object after changing its parent, but it is still possible by running a modifer with the new hierarchy, such as "MyPlayer/MyBlocks".
The format of this action is as so: "Parent(myBlocks.MyPlayer.)". Note that this action only allows one object to become the parent, so if there's several objects with the name, the game will pick up semi-randomly. This should always be the last modifer you call on an object.
-New Modifier Action: Sound. This allows you to play sounds from the sfx folder. It kinda works with some file formats, but I recommend using solely .wavs with this command. Also, this is a little finnickly and I can't promise it will work cross platform for the file paths. It's in a pretty rough state but hey, at least it's there.
to use this modifier, have a modifer named something like "Sound(sfx\downfast2.wav)", so you need to use relative file directories. Like I said, this doesn't work that well cross platform, and really you should only use wavs placed in the sfx folder with no spaces in the name.
-The Level Editor can now write names for every block type to the level file.
-New Modifier Action: Tag. This action finds any named objects similar to Parent, and changes their tag. This is most useful for using an Enemy to trigger a level, but not wanting that Enemy to be calculated for a win condition. Keep in mind Enemys will reset their tag on death.
The Appropriate usage of this action is as so: "Tag(Enemy.Activator.)".
-Buttons can now be toggled by any object tagged "Activator".
-New Modifier Action: Color. This action finds any named objects, and changes their sprite color, according to the following format. RGBA must be a number between 0 and 255. Color(.....)
-New Modifier Action: Background. This action finds any named objects, and forces their sorting layer to -1, which essentially means they will be drawn in the "background" of a level.
-An oversight with the prior steam workshop integration was the inability to update levels once they had been posted. That's fixed now.
-Slight UI changes in the "custom content" panel to accomodate workshop button changes.
-To allow for a lot more options in the game, I went ahead and recorded a bunch of new announcer lines! All players can find them and play clips with the Sound action, from the sfx folder.
-New Modifier Action: Foreground. This action finds any named objects, and forces their sorting layer to 2, which essentially means they will be drawn in the "foreground" of a level.
-New Modifier Action: NoGravity. This action finds any named objects, and if they have gravity, turns it off.
-Enemys can now pick a random color in a much wider range, though it still prefers a yellowish color.
-Steam Workshop code now updates the preview image on both initial upload, and subsequent updates.
-If you've muted the music before, with M. The titlescreen now remembers the set volume.
-The music during gameplay now also remembers volume.
-You can now mute the music in regular gameplay.
-Fixed a bug to do with Modifiers activating during the first frame of loading the level editor.
-Now, Player objects with 0 gravity can now also move directly up.
-Player objects now have vertical friction while in 0 gravity.
-New Modifer Action: AddPhysics. This adds a Rigidbody2D to any named objects. Essentially this allows you to add physical movement to any level object. Some weird things will happen with objects that already have it, so don't do that.
-Enemy units can now detect can now jump!
-Enemy units will now detect if there is no ground in front of them, and jump according to their skill.
-New Mechanic: Skill. Enemy units now randomly choose a 'skill' value between 0.1 - 0.7 on start. This is added to their calculating position for checking for ground in front of them, so more skilled units will jump more accurately.
-Skill now takes into account which direction an enemy is facing.
-Added better 'touching ground' logic to enemy's since they could FLY. Whoops!
-Both the player and enemies can no longer recognize eachother as 'ground' for the purposes of jumping.
-The Editor controls panel will now remember if you closed it and stay closed on subsequent reloads. This was just like, a quality of life thing. (I was getting annoyed by it)
-When opening a level in the editor (by holding ALT when clicking), the filename now is passed to the filename input field as well.
-Some AI Logic has been optimized and should run faster. this was necessary for the next bit.
-AI can now animate sprites and have jump animations just like the player.
-You can now preface a Text object name with a '#' to search the localizationmanager for translated phrases. This allows certains phrases to automatically translate to the player's chosen language from inside a level.
-I wrote an entire wiki specifically for this update. If I remember I wrote it, you'll be able to find it in your game folder with the update. It includes guides on uploading your levels and stuff like that.
-The "CustomContent" tab on the main menu now displays over all other UI present in play.
-You can now press a button in the "Controls" tab of the level editor to change the position of the object placer to whole numbers.
-You can now press a button in the "Controls" tab of the level editor to toggle an even slower form of movement.
-New Modifier Action: Spawner. Creates a new object that spawns the first found named object at its position every 5 seconds. Usage : Spawner(myBlock).
-Pistons can now also push anything tagged "PhysicsObject".
-RezNodes now resurrect characters when they 'stay' inside the field as well, instead of only on entry.
-New Modifer Action: Timer. Usage: Timer1(myblocks). Timers find all objects named, then disables them until an amount of time has passed, so for example, Timer1(myblocks) would find all objects named myblocks, then disable them for 1 second. It is then, theoretically possible to use the spawner to respawn them, creating long form timers. Keep in mind this will break any modifer actions on those objects till the timer is elapsed.
-Added a Steam Input config for use with Steam Link. Works pretty well!
-Added two more ground checks to the Player jump logic. There's a few benefits from this, which are as follows: 1. Jumping is WAY more reliable, since there's three checks and only one needs to be positive. Previously jumping was functional but just felt 'bad'. This was probably because there was only one check. 2. The three checks are evenly spaced in the character collider, which should give you more space to make difficult jumps.
-There's now Debug rays visble in engine for tuning purposes.
-Jumps still weren't smooth enough, so you can also jump if the player collider is touching an object tagged "Block", and it isn't a wall. This also has the positive side effect of allowing the player to jump off of sloped floors more accurately.
-You can now name Objects in the editor, but checking a toggle in the 'Controls' tab. This was a neccessary change with how important names now are in level editing.
-The name object logic will now replace spaces in object names. This is just to avoid errors since spaces are used as formatting in .d4h files.
-All UI has been changed to be more pretty. Thanks to Admurin for this, and a credit text has been added to the titlescreen.
-You can now tag an Object with "Ice", to disable friction while touching it. This means characters will slide, and applies even in no gravity scenarios.
-Money can now also be grabbed by AI! Be sure to get to it first!
-Fixed an error caused by too short modifer names.
-The game name on Steam has how officially changed to "Death Game". If you didn't know, Death Game originally launched in a two part free/paid model, however response to the paid version so much larger that the free version was eventually discontinued. For this reason, I've now finally removed the 'plus' which denoted the paid version.
-The Store page, and all platform images have received a rework, including adding some community avatars, full support for new library changes, and just overall a cleaner look. Enjoy!
-New debug hotkey: You can now press 'P' to preview the effects of any non-destructive modifiers currently loaded in the level editor. This is mostly usefull for seeing the 'look' of your level before testplaying it, and can't be undone without reloading.
-Modifer previews now only preview if you are not currently in a pop-up menu.
-rewrote the MOTD script to be a little moer clear about state.
-The old 'Game Jam Levels' are now playable with the plot blurbs at the beginning and the end respected.
-The Locale Manager (Translation logic) now catches some more errors and is therefore more reliable.