With Lightspeed Dating hitting 10-reviews and getting some huge exposure at the same time, there's currently an unprecedented spike of players, and with it, of course, a spike of bug reports.
When solo-developing a multiplayer game there is a tough choice between releasing in early-access, which allows some debugging before official release, but takes away the initial buzz and excitement that comes with a new launch, or launching directly into a full release without large-scale testing, risking a buggy product. Since Lightspeed Dating lives partially of the novelty of its central gameplay conceit, and I do not have the budget to create buzz for an early-access product, I've chosen to make it as complete as I can and then dive into the unknown.
For the most part, this strategy has worked out well. The server is stable and the amount of game-breaking bugs is fairly limited in a regular session, but as always there are edge-cases a single tester simply can't find. This post is intended to serve as an "I-hear-you", as the bug-reporting feature does not allow me to reach out to the bug-reporters.
Currently Known Bugs
- Server doesn't exist. It's currently not clear enough, that the player needs to enter a ServerID before pressing JoinServer, so a lot of players get stuck on this screen. In the next version the error message will be more clear, telling the player to enter a serverID.
- Occasionally, the UI of a room fails to show up. As a developer, the word "occasionally" sends shivers down my spine, because it makes finding causes pretty difficult. So far I haven't been able to reproduce it, so I would ask that anyone that encounters this still reports it, so I can collect enough data to figure out why this happens. In the next version there will be some failsafe measures that hopefully should reduce its occurrence rate, and allow me to figure out what's going on.
- The replay UI gets squashed. This is an old bug, that even shows up in our initial gameplay trailer, and I still haven't managed to fix it, because Unitys UI system is a bit messy at times. It's low priority, since it's mostly a visual problem, and will thus not be fixed in the next version. Hopefully I will figure out what causes it soon though.
- The countdown when the monster picks its target doesn't show up. This one is owed to the recent UI overhaul and was an easy fix. Will be fixed in the next update.
- Every time the game starts a player is immediately dead. This is more of a miscommunication issue, as the spectator screen currently says "You are dead", even when the player was spectating from the beginning. In the next version it will say "You are dead/spectating" to clarify to the player, that they perhaps left the spectating toggle on.
Upcoming Features (Within this week)
New Tutorial
This one is presumably the most desperately needed of all the new features, as (understandably) most players either miss the tutorial button in the main menu, or don't want to spend 10 minutes reading a wall of text before playing a game. I'm currently implementing an in-game tutorial that explains the game's central conceit, as well as some of it's more subtle intricacies, through an interactive info screen. Hopefully, this will clear up the game's central idea more.
Better Death Screens
To make it clearer to players why they died, I've implemented some more informative death screens, telling them who killed them and why. This should especially clear up when an innocent kills themselves by killing a human player.
Replay Voice Filter Toggle
As the voice filter often garbles players voices beyond recognition, and simply because it feels like a fun feature, there will be a toggle button to switch off the voice filters in the replays, allowing players to listen to the unchanged voice chat of the round. This isn't all that desperately needed, but will probably be pretty fun!
These features and bug-fixes should hopefully be released either today or tomorrow!
That's all for now, I hope you enjoy your time with Lightspeed Dating, despite some of its quirks and bugs. Please, do not hesitate to report any further bugs with the button in the bottom right corner or by joining our Discord channel and reporting them directly.
Thank you for playing and have fun!