Welcome to our first proper set of patch notes for Bits & Bops!
We've been listening to feedback from players, and we're trying very hard to address subjective issues as well as crashes and other bugs preventing people from progressing. We still have a long list to go, and we'll continue pushing out patches to address these over the coming days and weeks before we go on Christmas break.
We’ve noticed some players being brick-walled by Pantry Parade and Steady Bears, which was not our intention. As an immediate fix, we’ve relaxed the hit window in those games to smooth out the overall difficulty curve of the game. Longer term, we would like to invest some time into improving the cues and feedback given in those minigames to help players better keep time, at which point we may tighten the windows back up to their normal size.
We’re also aware of confusion in President Bird owing to the lack of audio response to indicate an “almost” input at the start of a hold note. We’ve added an extra sound layer to address this in the short-term, but we may rework this mechanically at a later stage to further improve clarity.
We've also seen some people interpret Bit's post-game remark that "we're not expecting any more minigames to arrive any time soon" to mean that we're not planning to push any content updates for the game. While we're not promising anything at this stage, and our short-term focus will be on fixing issues players are experiencing with existing content, it certainly wasn't our intention to definitively rule out further content updates, so we've updated this line to better reflect that.
In other news, we have now updated the Steam soundtrack metadata to include the full track names and lengths. This was previously spoilered so that we could set the store page live before launch without giving away any of the minigames, and updating this was a manual process.
One last note: as a matter of practicality, where we make changes to dialogue, the English version will likely be one step ahead of the translations, at least in these early stages while we are trying to rapidly push out fixes and adjustments to address the biggest problems players are having. Once our cadence slows to a more normal pace, we will do our best to ensure that all supported languages are fully translated in every version.
Game updates
Pantry Parade and Steady Bears (in their tutorials and their main games) now have more lenient hit windows (mixtapes are currently unchanged)
Pantry Parade, Steady Bears and Globe Trotters now allow more time before re-demonstrating the required inputs in their tutorials
Getting an “almost” judgement when starting a hold in President Bird now has an associated sound effect to communicate that you’ve missed
Input is now locked for the transition between Pantry Parade and Molecano in Final Mixtape to avoid pedantically punishing an extra step at the point of the cut
Bit’s post-game speech has been slightly reworded [English only]
The Chinese (Simplified and Traditional) and Japanese translations have received minor quality updates
Bug fixes
The treasure chest in Snakedown no longer has an extra lid when the charmer wakes up
The forged items in Blacksmith now properly line up with the thought bubbles
The “No Thanks” section in the credits now properly lines up with the corresponding achievements
The guest book now fills out completely after playing a level
Fan translations will no longer be auto-selected for users with the associated system language
Accessibility improvements
The screen reader now announces whose turn it is to start in Blacksmith (ordinarily communicated visually by the thought bubbles) [English only]
Dialogue with questions attached now play a separate sound when the screen reader is enabled to prevent accidental skipping of questions
If you would like to be the first to try new changes, you can opt in to the Steam beta channel via the game settings in your Steam client. We are very active in our Discord server and on the Steam community forums, and we greatly appreciate anyone who takes the time to report problems and work through the troubleshooting process with us.
Thanks for playing Bits & Bops!