Hey hey everyone time for the first update since the release!
Quick shoutout to everyone new and old who have gotten Beat Vector since the release, it has been an intense week and you guys have been nothing but supportive all throughout. The reviews were insanely kind from you, can't believe that we are rolling live and that all of you have came along for the ride!
Some of you have given some great feedback throughout the week so I tried to incorporate as much as I could to make Beat Vector even easier to play with and also to make editing a bit more comfortable. So let's go through everything that changed:
Early / Late feedback has been a topic brought on by the community for a while so I wanted to offer a solution that is not only useful but also fits the general design of the game.
The accuracy bar that until now lived in the top left corner and only displayed a moving average of your previous hits, had been moved closer with the rest of the HUD to be easier to glance at without obstructing the visuals right above the Play Area.
You can go under Options/Visuals and toggle it on and off under "Accuracy Bar (AVG)".
You will notice that there is also a new version of the bar called "Accuracy Bar (Per Hit)". Toggling this option on will flash the timing of your latest hit on the same horizontal bar as a fading heatmap where each hit triggers a little mark of your latest strikes, the left side being "Early" and the right side for hits that are more "Late" following the behaviour of the AVG bar.
The two features can be used together in an overlay where the average moves around as the individual hits flash.
They are all color coded according to the standard accuracy grades that you are familiar by now.
While the miss notes disappeared when you triggered a Beat Drop, the shattering animation failed on Mac devices. I rewrote the shader to be mac compatible so you should have the same experience as windows / linux users now. The animation overall is a bit smoother now across all devices.
You can now adjust the note speed by 10ms increments (as opposed to the previous 500ms and 100ms increments only), giving you a more fine grade control over your experience.
If you play with the leaderboard enabled, and complete a song, you should now see a countdown after you receive your final grade to let you know your rank after completing the level.
These levels had some miss note obstacle patterns that had gaps while playing on small note mode making it significantly easier to navigate compared to regular play sessions. Patch these up so that the players using this mode have to complete similar spinning maneuvers as the regular players to keep things fair.
Returning to a level selector after completing a song now will land you at the same stage where you left from, so no need to navigate back every time anymore
When hitting any of the calibration buttons in the options menu, now the screen properly fades to black instead of letting you awkwardly wait while the game boots the scene
Sometimes you just want to test your level from a specific timestamp, you shouldn't have to play through the entire song over and over again. This new feature supposed to fix that up. When you hit "Test play" you should see a little slider that will allow you to adjust the time where the test round should begin.
Additionally you can just click anywhere on the timeline with ctrl + click to set the timestamp in a more convenient manner while the panel is active
Two new shortcuts have been added to the editor, these are:
ctrl+ shift + space: toggle interactive mode
ctrl+ shift + m: toggle multikey mode
These should make the experience a little bit smoother while you are editing so you can iterate on your map even faster!
There were also a few other questions/suggestions that have been raised that I had some time to look into so wanted to give you an update with regards to those:
1, Adding options for smaller screen sizes:
Beat Vector's menu operates in a 3D setup which gives the whole "live environment" feel to it. Unfortunately that also means that the player perspective is fixed. While wider screen setups have been adjusted in a way to be accomodated, with some fluff on the sides, smaller views cut pieces of the menu out of screen space (think about it as if you are just adding two pages of paper on the side of your screen to cover the rest). I don't have a good solution for this at the moment and will need some significant workaround so it's not something I would say confidently that you could expect soon, albeit I do keep it in mind as I hope I could port the game to mobile one day and this would be a necessary feature for that.
2, Countdown "START" doesn't have a buffer
I have a rough guess on how to work around this by adding a little space into the game but I would need some more time to test this out thoroughly so I ask for your patience with regards to this. Not forgotten though!
3, Color Variations on Notes
Some performance oriented monitors tend to saturate colors in certain direction. This combined with the brightness levels of the miss notes can result in an overall display where the right side notes (orange) and miss notes (cherry red) can seem a bit too close to one another in their color patterns. I have also received some requests earlier to add multiple color options for the notes to better align with certain color schemes used by some consoles to make things a bit more customizable.
I also wanted to pretty up the notes a little bit so rest assured it's something I want to work on in the future, I just don't have a good solution for it yet.
I am afraid that's all for now, hope you will find everything working as it should, and as always, feel free to ping me if you see anything that's buggy, or simply would like to recommend some features, I am always happy to hear from you.
Oh and of course super psyched to see what you cook up with the editor!
Once again a giant thank you to everyone who have left a review and everyone else who decided to give a vote of confidence to Beat Vector by downloading it, y'all are the best.
Take care~
Sled