Free Roam & Character Control Improvements [Test Branch] (Update #403)

Hey everyone!

Rare Saturday Test branch update!

Some very important QOL improvements for Free Roam that eventually bleed into Arena matches.

Free Roam kind of works as our safe, 'testing' area, where we can experiment before we send changes to the Arena matches.

Been wanting to get these fixes in for a long time, were really bothering me when they stopped working at some point!

🤔How to Access Test Branch:

How to opt into the free test branch to test new features early:

https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/276C-85A0-C531-AFA3

🆕Changes:

🌍Free Roam:

• More iteration on Cannons

• Added collectible coins for testing

• Added terrain to area of Free Roam

• Added portal locations to different spots of map to make getting around faster

  //Cannons don't seem to fire in this build, will be fixed in next update

• Free Roam Music (the chill lofi songs) properly play in Free Roam every time now.

⚠️Hazards:

• Added a Lever that switches between on and off

• Can be plugged into objects to do things

• Lever Switch and Foot Switch are adjusted with better audio

• Portals play their teleportation visual effect on both sides of the teleport

• Cannon Balls properly apply force from player swings

🧍🏼‍♂️🧍🏼‍♀️Player:

• Smoothed out 3rd person camera in free roam, especially when in-air (less twitchiness)

  //There's still a few instances where you do get twitching, expect a fix in the next update!

• Fixed skin on Large Normal Guy to use correct skin

• Shrink and grow effects have audio variance and sound slightly different each time, making hearing repeated sounds sound more natural

• Large and small sizes have unique running animations! (Normal Guy only for now)

• Small and large sizes have unique footstep sounds based on size and their sounds triggering are more consistent

• Large footsteps have unique footstep particles

• Swing sounds have been made more consistent across the board

  //Their 'woosh' sound from swinging will be heard on every button press, and is no longer tied to animation frame. This makes swinging 'feel' more consistent, even though swinging was still working every time

• Player grunts now match the size of the player!

  //High pitched grunts for small

  //Low pitch for large

• Jump Up (the sound of players kicking their feet off the ground) has been tweaked to more noticeable as a sound, which is an important cue in platforming.

• Player no longer has head arrow in free roam

🛠️Fixes:

• Fixed bugs with Music Player in Pause Menu

• Fixed song names being incorrect in Music Player

🐞Known Issues:

• Cannons in Free Roam no longer fire when turned on by the switch

  //Will be fixed in next update

• Player's bottom UI circle projects onto player meshes and clubs when it shouldn't

• Big performance spikes in Free Roam (it's a big scene holding a lot of objects but performance should still be better, almost finished with another set of optimizations)

🔮On The Way:

☁️Cloud Saves:

• We've pushed code in recent builds that should handle Steam Cloud saves for everyone, we just want to give it a little more testing and confirm it's merging playtimes of multiple devices correctly each time!

👩🏼Women Playable Characters:

• The first woman playable character is mostly ready to go out!

• We just need to apply a final fix to her clothes to make sure there's no clothing mishaps during gameplay (weird UV and texture normals bug)

• After we're confident with her model, we'll release more variants, until we've got 8 total women characters (or template characters)

• Again we're building the system to be modular, so eyes, hair, noses, mouths, clothing and accessories can be swapped in and out and create some nice variety.

💾Basic Account Progression:

• With Cloud Saves confirmed to be working, we'll next start applying basic player levels to your account based on games played, goals scored, and achievements unlocked in-game.

• It's meant to be a foundation for progression as you play the game.

• By default, not everything will be unlocked, but you'll unlock more as you play.

• Maps, characters, and cosmetics would be unlocked from playing the game.

♾️More Stage Hazard Variants and Customization:

• More unique stage hazards will come with the new toys we've been experimenting with in Free Roam:

• Switches, Levers, Cannons, and Collectibles

• Grab-able Hazards: Want to reposition a hazard or take it with you? Go ahead and play around.

  //We'll be experimenting with what level of freedom makes the most sense, and what players like. Do you want complete freedom of any hazard in-game? Or does it make sense to limit to hazards on your side?

• Adjust Hazard Refresh Time: Make hazards rotate on a set interval you choose, or set to random for absolute chaos.

👋🏼Better Tutorial Experience:

• We're continuing to flesh out the tutorial in Free Roam to teach the basics of the game controls in a simple way. Expect little challenges and tests that teach you how each of the main actions work in-game.

🔊Better Music Randomness:

• The music player will soon take into account what songs have been played previously and aim to play new songs, vs playing a random new song every time.

  //I think this has mostly been corrected, but we'll be adding some caching to make sure this works every time

🤏🏼More Unique Size Interactions:

• Wanna use your weight to slam down on a trampoline, then shrink small when going up to get super big air? Small interactions like that are on the way.

• Weighted pressure plates, pipes and gaps only small size can fit through, breakable objects only large can smash, to give an idea.

🪙Collectibles in Free Roam:

• Collectibles (like coins, fruits, stars) will come to free roam, as we build more tools for making custom platformer-style levels for the single player experience.

😁Improved Character Animations & Expressiveness:

• Giving another pass to our player animations. They're responsive (aka they hit the key poses at around the right times to make player feedback feel like they're working), but they are a little twitchy due to the way we initially made them and sped them up.

• So we'll be doing a pass to lock in those key frames, normalizing their speed and cutting out in-betweens that look a little twitchy on higher frame rates.

• Characters will blink again and have various facial expressions based on what's happening in scene, giving them some more personality and aliveness.

• Gliding will get unique animations, with a unique pose and character tilting in the direction you're leaning in.

• Unique animations for player jumps in the 'up' and 'down' state of the jump.

👀More Feedbacks from Hazards and Materials:

• Hazards are getting updated to have more visual feedback when interacted with, and we're taking this even further.

• Things like 'dash effects' when receiving the effects of a dash panel, or unique audio when inside a fan are all little details we're putting in to make feedback feel even more clear and 'finished' when using.

• Materials will react differently depending on the object they're interacting with

  //Think how the ball has unique interactions with snow, grass, dirt, sand and more--we want to apply that to the player and more unique interactions between objects.

🏆Tournament Brackets:

• A tournament mode where you can play against a set of teams to win a championship.

• Create a team with a team logo and player roster, and compete in a league against other teams.

  //Part of us expanding ways to play Arena Matches. With more character model variety in-game, we can make tournaments between teams and eventually build up to seasons with playoffs.

🏃🏼‍♂️Player Momentum:

• Movement in Free Roam feels good, but we want to take it a step further.

• 'Momentum' (to us) is where players gain and lose speed slightly based on running up or down sloped surfaces or terrain. So running up or down surfaces have a feeling of weight, and you can do fun things like shoot yourself off a curved surface for big air! 🦔🦔

🦘Coyote Time:

• Along with momentum, 'coyote time' is that brief period you've walked off a surface but can still jump. It's common in platformers, and we've been looking forward to implementing it here too!

💪🏼Unique Character Abilities:

• Why choose the Lightning characters over the Fire characters?

• We want to add small gameplay reasons for having different elemental characters on your team.

• We'll be experimenting with the best implementation, but we have lots of ideas!

  //Think supers/ultimates, elemental affinities, strengths/weaknesses, team chemistry.

⛰️New Unique Biomes:

• Marsh, Jungle, Forest, and Beach Biomes will roll out once we've build environments for them that we're happy with and can keep the file size reasonable.

More to come!

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