Hello players! Today's patch is a BIG one going into the weekend (I want to take a little time away from working as a dev/support agent/marketer and play some putt putt golf), and has a lot of QOL changes with a couple additions I've seen asked for, as well as some fixes for some of the major bugs (sorry it took me a couple days folks!). It also has an update on what I'm focusing on in the coming days/weeks, AND a question for the community. Let's get to it.
New Additions
- Custom Gallery Collections! — you can now add subfolders to the custom gallery folder that will group the custom gallery by the name of the subfolder, of course updating the map and book as well.
- Custom Gallery Piece Count — you can now select whether or not you want the piece count of your custom gallery to be low, medium, or high. The scaling is basically half the default for low and twice as many for high, so for the latter be careful, some systems may not be handle that many pieces, and it will warn you.
- Custom Gallery Fill Option — some of you wanted the opportunity to exclude the base game's paintings entirely (idk why you wouldn't want some Mondrian's in there) BUT there is now a toggle for either filling it with the defaults OR repeating the images you loaded (for those of you that wanted an all white gallery, it only takes one image now).
- Book Zoom — hold right-click/R3/whatever you bound zoom to while reading the book to zoom in a little bit.
- LARGE Text Option — You can now select the size of text in a dropdown between default and large. This will hit between loads and may require a restart to fully hit.
- Movement Rebinding (no more sticky WASD) — Sorry lefties, I left you out to dry a little bit. You can now rebind your movement directions.
- Reduce Flashing Accessibility Option — There is now an option to reduce flashing of effects in the settings menu.
- Sprint Toggle — There's now a toggle for whether or not you want hold to sprint or toggle.
QOL Changes
- The Hand in Custom Gallery — The Hand is now attainable in the custom gallery mode, it was previously not because I gated off custom games from achievements, but now its fine! It should be granted to you on next load if you still have the save.
- Settings Menu Revamp — I added tabs to the setting menu cause it was getting BIG, so its a bit more organized now.
- Custom Gallery Image Loading — I've added a little text to indicate when some images aren't able to be loaded. The gallery only accepts JPG's and PNG's, but now it's a little better at telling you.
- Book Page Turning — Book page turning now follows whatever you bound to the left/right movement keys.
Bugs
- WHERE IS THE LAST PIECE?! — Players, I finally figured it out. There were pieces hiding under the stanchion posts (silly pieces) and I've added a little barrier and pushback to prevent that from happening. So so sorry and thank you for your patience.
- Controller Issues — Some controllers had issues connecting/reconnecting if the game was tabbed out, and should be good to go now.
- Piece's Launching — A few players experienced pieces launching rather than dropping after pickup. From some of the log files I looked at, I traced it to dropping a piece while it was still zipping to your hand. Fixed at the root, plus a speed cap so nothing can ever eject that fast again.
- Book Locking — Opening the skill tree or pause menu while you were using the book could potentially lock you up, it can't now!
- Stairs — In some low framerate instances, players experienced issues walking up the stairs, now that's fixed.
Performance
- Piece piles were too excited — There were some reports of performance decreases when piling a bunch of pieces because some pieces just weren't going to sleep! I gave them a Benadryl and they should be snoozing now.
- Logs — I added more logs to help monitor performance issues and get a better grasp of optimization.
UPCOMING
Multiplayer is of course on the front of mine and many of your minds, however, that is something I REALLY want to do more work on and test before that will be ready for release. One thing I'm focusing on sooner rather than later is localization. I have a total of 0 experience in localization and will be doing research to try and get multiple languages at LEAST somewhat supported in the game sooner rather than later. And who knows, maybe a bigger map? I'm gonna be a busy man (although I do need to be sure to take a little break here and there).
COMMUNITY
Hey everyone! How are we liking the achievements?
The Bull achievement requires players to beat a run in 3 hours. The Two Forms requires players to beat a challenge mode. I have seen some feedback that neither of these are very "cozy" friendly, as the challenge modes are quite difficult and sub 3 hours without any abilities is virtually impossible. My philosophy on the achievements sadly ignored cozy players a bit too hard I think. In my mind, completionists (those that want to 100% every game) like a challenge, they don't like games to be too easy to finish. However, I never think that my opinion is universally right, just that it is mine, and in this instance I worry that my lived experience and subset of people I talked to that are a part of the completionist community does not reflect the community as a whole. Obviously, I understand I cannot please every player, but I also want to make sure I haven't deterred people from a game I'm very proud of, at least not a majority. At the end of the day, I recognize the decision is mine as the dev to change or keep the current achievements, however, I still want to make sure all of your voices are heard in this decision. SO, what do we think? Too much? You love them? You didn't notice? Let me know in the replies!
Thanks for playing, thanks for reading, thanks for reporting bugs, discussing, the whole 9 yards.
— Th3GameStudio