Hey everyone!
Marble World entered beta today with a ton of new content in and outside of the game! Achievements have been introduced alongside collectable Steam cards and awards for completing the set!
As for the in-game content, transparent marbles have been introduced and they look a lot cleaner due to rendering improvements. Another big item is that freeform tracks are now split up behind the scenes similar to placing static track objects which allows for painting individual parts.
As usual bugs got fixed, new paint & marble skins have been introduced and more factory props have been added!
Beta
In preparation for the launch on the 30th of September the game got improvements on several fronts in order to deliver a better experience. The main menu is less cluttered and has a new background, linking tutorial has been improved and a new help panel section for linking has been added. In addition all outdated icons have been updated and the paint panel's custom paint icons have been made more clear.
All of this and more can be found in the patch notes at the bottom.
Achievements & Cards
Marble World now has achievements and trading cards! The cards will be distributed based on the amount of played time overall, so you might already have seen some notifications if you played enough. The set requires 8 cards and there are several emoticons & backgrounds to be earned.
The achievements will start tracking as of this patch. I've made sure they're all fair and not too grindy to achieve.
Transparent Marbles & Rendering
This patch introduces a different way of rendering marbles. Transparency wasn't properly available before but is now! The new form of rendering allows for more detail & accurate reflections. Marbles will now look more real than before.
When creating custom marbles, there is now a template for transparent marbles. Inside the marble is a randomized swirl. Currently this is automatically added, but in the near future this will be customizable with various shapes & colouring.
Freeform track painting
Freeform tracks are now "split" into sections and their individual parts they normally consist of.
Older tracks which only could be painted in 1 colour are split similarly on starting the world and will automatically have that 1 paint applied to all sections. You can then overwrite each section if wanted.
Patch notes
Patch notes for Patch 0.2.0:
- Added transparency for marbles
- Added 8 new paints
- Added a new zigzag marble skin
- Added a bee marble skin
- Added achievements
- Added more background music
- Removed the Early Access pop-up when starting the game
- Added a linking page to the help panel
- Added the ability to rebind camera speed to buttons
- Added a small track spawner
- Added a giant spawner capable of spawning 450 marbles at once
- Added 6 more factory props
- Added a cone light
- Updated all outdated UI icons
- Updated the input settings panel
- Updated the main menu
- Upon renaming a world an error will be given if the name is taken or empty
- The linking tutorial has now more things to do
- Freeform tracks are now split into separate sections
- Magnet maximum radius is now increased to 20
- Checkpoints now emit a logic pulse when a marble crosses during a race
- Increased the render distance on the playroom to match other environments' distance
- Loopings have been visually smoothed
- The paint panel now has different icons for showing customizable paints
- The level load panel now allows for renaming and switching environments
- Planets in the space environment now have no gravity (they already didn't due to a bug)
- Fixed an issue where placed lights would block marbles
- Fixed an issue where opening the paint panel would induce lag for a little bit
- Fixed an issue where a 16:10 resolution would let panels overlap in the new world selection panel
- Fixed an issue where the mover would move whilst being linked but not getting a pulse
- Fixed an issue where the planet paint didn't scale properly
The future
In 3 weeks the game will go into full release, until then only bugfixes will be applied and perhaps some really necessary edits. During this time work will be done for future patches, but the launch should as stable as it can get.
At launch the game will be discounted by 10% for a week! So grab a copy then if you haven't done so yet :)
Post-launch the game will be getting some big updates such as:
- Teams for marbles
- Light controls for glow in the dark tracks
- Controller support
- DLCs (only thematic, no features will be locked behind DLCs)
And of course I'll be looking into other platforms to release on:
- MacOS
- Linux
- Xbox
- Playstation
- Mobile
- VR
As always thanks for reading and your continuous support!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1491340/Marble_World/