Hey spinners, we've back from Gamescom and our very first exhibition of the Switch version! Pix below.
Gamescom!
Thanks to all our Euro Discord members who came to visit and play the game, you are the best. Pix are on our Discord (didn't want to post any faces here in case anyone wasn't cool with that).
Middle shot is Shath, Dave and Steve (left to right) - check out the incredible Jimmy / LadyJ cosplay by Shath's partner Ingrid. She works in film and TV as a seamstress, and custom made these sweet outfits using incredible reflective materials. They look black until they catch the light, and then they turn purple, blue and golden.
We had such an awesome time in Europe (it had been 5 years since our team was there) - and we hope we can come back soon.
Our next event is PAX Aus (October 6-8) - if you're an Aussie and want to meet up during this time, let us know!
Friday and Sunday badges are still available. We're in literally the bottom left corner of the entire hall, next to the southernmost entrance.
Switch port
The Switch version is done, it's rocking a 99% stable 60fps (occasional hiccups in 4 player vs mode and some unoptimised backgrounds).
We have included 4 player split screen which we have playable in the community sneak peak beta branch on Steam if you want to give it a try. It's a bit buggy, but most of the issues have been fixed already, just not pushed live to the beta branch. There's some other broken things we want to polish before putting out a Steam update, but Switch is taking up most of our time at the moment.
Due to the way we have cut tracks for lower difficulties, players can play multiplayer with any difficulty they want independent of each other. This means an XD player and an Easy player can play together and the game will dynamically shorten the XD track at the same place as the Easy cuts, meaning no player will ever experience any down time. There are a few glitches here with some tracks with complicated cuts (such as Ginger Lizard) but the system already works very well for the most part. It was great to see experienced players playing alongside new players at Gamescom with onlookers getting a taste for the variety of difficulties present in the game.
Players can also have custom options profiles (wheel colours, skins etc.) when playing multiplayer.
We were hoping to release in early October, but Nintendo's lotcheck process is taking a bit longer than we'd hoped. Not only is the submission process very thorough, every time there's an issue the game has to be resubmitted, taking potentially another 3-7 days to find the next issue. We've run into a few legal problems tracks using Nintendo samples, which is causing a hold up currently, but we feel like we are close to the end of this process.
Steam update
We've also updated the way levelling up works. Gaining a level will now give you a key which you can use to unlock tracks in basically whatever order you like. Tracks are grouped in "tiers" of 6 songs each, and players only have to unlock a single track from each tier to enable access to the next. This better solves our issue of not wanting to bombard players with too many tracks initially, while giving more agency and ownership over how they build their tracklist out. Players who are happy to play things in order can still do that, and those who know the playlist more intimately can get the tunes they want without having to grind levels they don't like. Neat!
Demo!
We're also working on a Steam demo which will hopefully be ready in time for PAX. It will be interesting to see the effect this has on the game. We've heard mixed things about having demos available for games, but so many people have expressed to us that once they play SRXD they have a completely different and almost instant understanding of what the game is, which has been difficult for us to put into words or market properly in the past. Stay tuned!
Thanks for spinning and hopefully we'll have an update for you soon.