We’re nearly there! Guntastic will unlock later today (at 6PM CET) on Steam Early Access. In this post I’d like to go over what we worked on in the past few weeks in preparation for the game’s release.
Customizable Game Rules
Being able to customize how a match is played was one of the most popular request we got during the beta. So coming in the first Early Access release is the ability to change the Kill Goal players need to reach to win the game and the Round Time Limit after which players are forcibly eliminated.
Five kills matches are good for unforgiving duels between two players, while 20+ kills matches will likely last a lot!
Since changing these two simple values can already have a drastic effect on the game’s pace, we decided to limit the feature (at least for now!) to local couch games and online private games and to a limited set of options.
- Kill Goal: 5, 10 (default), 15, 20, 30.
- Round Time Limit: No limit, 15s, 20s, 25s (default), 30s.
More options will be considered and eventually added as we iterate on the feature. As always, we look forward to your feedback!
Discord Notifications
For last month’s beta we got basic integration with Discord into the game so that you could see who was playing Guntastic by looking at his status. In the Early Access release of the game we added a feature that leverages Discord Webhooks to post a message into a dedicated #matchmaking channel whenever someone is looking to play online.
All hail the Guntastic bot!
We hope this will give players a chance to find opponents more easily. For a future update we’d like to make join requests work seamlessly through Discord, so that you could then simply click on a player’s avatar to join the match on Steam.
Platform Support: Windows 32-bit and Xbox One
For the Early Access release we expanded the line-up of supported platforms to include Windows 32-bit (in addition to Windows 64-bit and macOS). We’re also excited to announce that Guntastic will come to Xbox One in 2020!
(We received a few questions regarding Linux support, but I’m afraid we don’t have any definite plans for it at the moment. Each port brings several challenges – from development to testing – that we need to carefully evaluate before committing to it. Remember: we’re a very small studio! With Linux, what bothers me the most is testing due to how fragmented the ecosystem is.)
Bugs Fixes & Improvements
During last month’s open beta we received several bug reports related to the UI and the game itself. For this first Early Access release we decided to focus on the UI:
- Lobby: fixed an issue that would reset all players to use the same character in local games when the game window lost focus (i.e. because it was minimized).
- Lobby: fixed several issues with the character/level grids displaying out-of-date data during both local and online games.
- Lobby: clicking on a “Join” button should no longer join the player in a different slot.
- Lobby: reduced flickering when switching between the character selection and level vote screen.
- Lobby: player join/leave sounds were fired incorrectly in certain cases.
- Accessibility: items in the character/level grids now have a mouse hover state.
- Game is now compiled using the Shipping profile in UE4 for increased performance.
Keep those bug reports coming during Early Access! 😄 That’s it for now. We look forward to your feedback here on Steam or on Discord. See you soon in Early Access!