The Level Builder in Conduct DELUXE! has always been an important part of our vision for the game. However, we always intended the Level Builder to be a very social experience, and with this update we want to enable that social experience for the players, with a new BIG feature for the game. It's called...
Conduct World!
With a new button from the main menu, you can access Conduct World! From here, you can view levels built by other players from all around the world. Browse, sort, search, and maybe find something that catches your eye? Quick previews of every level lets you peek in at what's in store. Once you find a level that you want to try, a single click later and you're in the action! Your personal progress is tracked across all levels. Any stars earned when playing levels on Conduct World will be displayed in the level browser, so that you can tell which levels you've perfected, and which new ones are waiting for you.
From within the Level Builder, you can publish your own creations to Conduct World. With the press of a button, your proudest creation is now published online for the rest of the world to enjoy! We hope to see players make all kinds of different levels. Easy, hard, short, long, tense, relaxed, contemporary, or avantgarde levels. All is welcome! As a service to the player, all published levels will include information on whether the author themselves are able to complete the level. If you choose to make incredibly hard levels, you can prove to the world that they certainly can be beat! Play and complete your level from within the Level Builder, and it will be marked as completable. If you make any changes to your level, you will have to beat it again to keep its completion status.
We hope to see level creators out there share their creativity and genius on Conduct World! Share your crazy creations with everyone, and don't be afraid to show off the fancy pieces you have unlocked throughout your Conduct journey. If you are a player simply looking for levels to play, there's no need to worry. You can pick and play any level off Conduct World, with no requirements for normal single player unlocks. Go earn yourself some stars on Conduct World!
Major bug fixes and optimizations for the Level Builder
We felt that it was important to improve the Level Builder experience, so that the players can focus on building the best levels before they publish them to Conduct World. We have been hard at work and are happy to present an improved Level Builder.
The Level Builder has seen a major rework of the internals, which solves some very annoying bugs. The overall experience of placing tracks, switches, trains, and cars will now be a more smooth and reliable process. Two of the worst problems up to this point have been inconsistent track-to-track snapping, and trains sometimes jumping tracks or starting in the opposite direction when you play the level. Both of these problems are gone with this update. Tracks will connect to eachother as you would expect, and trains will stay on their original tracks and go the expected way.
With this major patch, we also bring improvements to the performance of the Level Builder. It is very important for us that anyone can play and make custom levels, regardless of how powerful their computer is. We hope that these optimizations will help your Conduct experience be a more pleasent one.
A note on loading old custom levels
Loading a custom level built using an older version of the game (before v1.1) is possible, but any placed trains cars will be missing. This will only happen the first time you load an pre-v1.1 level. You can place any missing trains and cars right away and they will be saved properly from then on.
Why does this happen?
Because of the big differences in the way the train and car placement information is stored, old custom levels need to be changed to fit the new structure. The game will try to reconstruct the level from the old saved file, but in a way so that it supports the new level structure. This will happen automatically when you load an old custom level, but an unfortunate effect of this transition is that the game can not reliably reconstruct the trains and cars that you have placed previously. We decided that the safest thing to do here is to discard them instead of placing them randomly. We are very sorry for the inconvenience this might cause you.
Let's embark on a new adventure!
We can't wait to see what kind of wacky inventions will appear on Conduct World. We have already included a few of our own creations to get started, but we are really excited to see what the players will build and share with the rest of the world! If you have any suggestions, encounter any bugs, or really want to show us something cool on Conduct World, feel free to send us a message. We are always listening on the Steam Discussions, on our Discord, and on email.