Vecter News

Made enough changes and fixes! Time for another patch update to explain what's been happening. Some of these were requested by you guys through the Community Hub and I am happy to oblige wherever possible.

- Fixed tutorial bug where the tutorial text would appear all at once on screen.
- Made the tutorial texts look a little better
- There is now a Sound Volume option in the options menu. It's called SFX Volume for Sound effects volume. So now you can adjust your music and sound effects separately.
- Fixed a bug where the game would hang after someone destroyed their ship.
- A tiny optimization that probably wont' be noticed at all in FPS but it made me happy
- Visualizer now reacts to youtube sound when playing a youtube video in game.
- Changed the visualizer to be longer so its more visible
- Made the mountains and city less tall so they don't occupy so much of the screen
- Moved the mountain a bit to the left so that it's peak is in the centre of the screen
- City generator has been modified so that cities now look better
- Spinners (The big washing machines in later-game) will now no longer let you enter their walls and pass through them
- First person extra lives now displayed correctly
- Indicator in the play menu to show if a youtube video was detected in memory and if it will be played in the background
- Option so the in-game music doesn't stop when you crash your ship
- Option to not roll the camera with the ship
- Option to turn vsync on/off
- Lines on the road no longer disappear on very narrow roads
- Youtube video now spins with the camera and stays in place which makes visibility more plesant

If you're interested just in the release notes, you can find them at the bottom of this post, but if you're also interested in my excitement and feelings + some in-game hidden gems, read on.


[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

I finally happened! I finally found a way to integrate guns in a way I'm happy with that affects the game-play but not change it completely. I can finally change the game's description in steam and everywhere else on the internet. It's an amazing day!

Oh dear... I just realized I have to add a whole new section to the user guide... Damn... In case you don't know of the user guide's existance, there is a button in the game's main menu to reach it. You could also click here to get to it, but might want to finish reading this first. I'll add all the new bits to it after this update goes live.



The guns are bound by default to Space Bar on the Keyboard, and Right Bumper on Xbox / PS controllers (or R2 as PlayStation refers to it).

The guns are powerful, especially at later upgrade levels, however their usage comes at a considerable cost: Each bullet drains your high score, and the more guns you have, the more bullets you fire, the faster your score goes down. So being stingy is a really good strategy, or not? What do I know.

However, guns are not the only thing I've added ;) There's one more new mechanic.


Sometimes, all you need in life is a good kick in the ass. This is the button that applies that! At ship Level 3 you will unlock the Afterburner. Press the Left Control or down on the Left Stick on your controller and you will shoot off at double your max speed, and start slowing down from there.

However, this little trick costs a whole extra life to activate, so time it wrong and it just might be the end of your run.




A LOT of people have been asking for Spotify integration. Listen, I would really love to give you that, I would, but Spotify have a very strict policy on using their platform in other software. So it's probably not going to happen.

So here's something better: Start the game, start a run, Pause, Alt+Tab, open a youtube video, copy the url, Alt+Tab back into the game. Video in the sky!!!

Now you don't have to do it in that order. All you need to do is copy a video url and the game will pick it up from memory if it's the last thing you copied.

Sadly, right now it doesn't support YouTube streams as they appear to work a little different to youtube videos. But it's something I have my eye on for adding in the future as it would be absolutely insane to just stream "lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to" straight in-game.

In case you don't know what I'm on about:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


[h2]New Stuff[/h2]

• New mechanic: Guns
  
• Pillars, Windmills, The pillars on the bonus gates, Traffic and Spheres can be destroyed with guns.
  
• New mechanic: Afterburner
  
• New feature: You can now play YouTube videos in the background of levels in the sky. Just go to YouTube, copy the url from your browser tab and then switch back to the game, it should pick it up automatically.
  
• New obstacles: Spinners
  
• Polls have learned how to levitate and dance.
  
• Screen added in the main menu to show what your next ship upgrade is and how much points you need to get it
  
• Draw distance increased by 30%
  
• You now get more extra lives the more your ship gets upgraded.
  
• New tutorial prompts added for shoot and boost mechanics.
  
• Shadow names above players simplified for performance improvements, but are now less readable. Will look at fixing this in a patch.
  
• Button combination "Select + Shoot" now turns the UI on/off just like Ctrl+U does, so you can turn off the UI from a controller as well
  
• There is now a little text under each controller in the "Play" Menu which tells you which button to hold in order to activate multiplayer
  
• The window that shows your scores in the play menu now also shows your position on the leaderboard
  
• Textboxes now have a blinking cursor position indicator so that you know they are textboxes
  
• You can now copy and paste seeds into the seed textbox in the play menu, so you no longer have to type them in manually.
  
• Skyways no longer appear as often
  

[h2] Fixed Stuff [/h2]

• Player Names menu updated to new UI and fixed.
  
• Change Colour Scheme achievement now works again.
  
• Shadow playbacks no longer interrupt early
  
• You can't get on the leaderboard by watching a shadow playback anymore
  
• Added some loading screens here and there when the internet connection is causing delays
  
• Fixed a little knob thing floating in your face in first person mode inside of the ship
  

[h2] Performance improvements [/h2]

• Rewrite of the code that detected ship steering to improve performance
  
• Caching done on the input detector code per frame since there is no need to call the same logic a million times to get the same result
  
• Spawn-in animations are turned off for Low and UltraLow graphics settings to get some performance improvements for lower-end machines.
  

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

I don't want to give anything away, I just want you guys to watch and hopefully get excited like me right now.

I’ve started development on Vecter on the 7th of April 2019. It feels like forever ago… Following quite a bit of unexpected interest and encouragement, I gave Steam their hush money, uploaded it, and officially launched into Early Access on November 4th, 2019. People enjoyed it so much that Vecter has over 400 reviews and a positive rating of over 95%. Not bad for one guy in a room and his online friends on discord ey?

Vecter has been featured on GameJolt, it reached the New and Trending section on Steam’s Free to Play hub when it launched in Early Access and dozens of Videos on youtube have been made about it, thanks to you all.

But you can’t keep a game unfinished forever, at some point you have to stop being a little bug-fest and evolve into a full and complete working title. And here’s the plan to get there.

Starting July 17th 2020, Vecter will leave its Alpha phase and enter its Beta phase. What this means is that by this point the game is feature-complete and no major changes will be made going forward. Only bug-fixes, optimizations, improvements and maaaybe a minor change here and there if needed.

I will be relying on you guys to help me out and tell me everything that’s wrong with it in terms of bugs and performance issues, so that we can make it as good as it’s going to get. I want it to be SOLID on launch.

Then, somewhere between 17th-20th of September 2020, I will “PUSH DA BUTTON” to leave Early Access, making it a fully launched title for all to enjoy. Our hard work will be seen by all and they will hopefully find it to their liking.



I mentioned earlier none of this was really planned, and that’s true as I was, for the most part, making stuff up as I was going along. However there is one thing I have wanted since I started development: Multi-platform and Cross-platform.

It’s not hard to notice that Vecter is only playable on Windows PC. That’s the only thing it was built for initially in the interest of keeping development as simple as possible so I can cram in as many features and content as possible.

But I want to see it on Mac and Linux, on Android and iPhone; Switch, Xbox, PS, I want to see it on pretty much any device I can get my hands on and port to AND I want to see it everywhere for FREE.



I have an Android phone and I have a PC, so attempting some basic ports is in the realm of possibility but that wouldn’t provide a good experience for everyone and actually porting everywhere is a really expensive job.

Porting to Mac and doing a good job of it requires a Mac. Ideally two or three from different generations to test and remove all the bugs that may occur. Porting to Android requires having a few different phones to test on and see how it behaves on different hardware from different manufacturers.

Arguably porting to a console would be easier, but that has a high cost in terms of time and various changes to the game to meet the guidelines and requirements set by different console vendors.

All of the above adds up to a time and financial investment, and my regular salary cannot foot the bill on that one as I’ve been doing so far. There’s a big jump from spending £70 on a steam submission fee to £3000 on a selection of hardware to test on + other unforseen costs.

I’m currently looking at various funding options like crowdsourcing, publishing, government grants, etc. so I’ll keep you all posted on my progress on this, but I’m hoping that sheds a light on what you’ll get from Vecter after Launch. If anyone does have some good funding ideas in the UK, let me know.