Baldi's Basics Plus News

Version 0.4.2 is now available! This update may be small, but that's because I've begun working on new stuff! In fact, I've already finished a new item that will be added in version 0.5!

As I continue working on new stuff, expect fewer bug fixes than in the 0.4.1 update. I'll try to get around to fixing all the current known issues eventually!

• Big Ol' Boots now last 60 seconds.
  
• Outside force modifiers (Such as wind or BSODA) now use a priority system that will cause lower priority modifiers to be ignored.
  

• Fixed a bug that would cause NPCs to navigate through walls when targeting, wandering, and then targeting again in quick succession, such that the start cell and target cell never changed with each calculation.
  
• Heavily reworked balloons to fix several issues they've had since the 0.4 update. They now pop when taken outside of a class room before respawning. When swapping a held balloon, the held balloon now takes the selected balloon's position. Balloons now have better movement.
  
• Fixed some issues relating to changing the height of a non-grounded entity.
  
• Fixed BSODA passing through entities when they are being pushed by multiple outside forces at the same time.
  
• Fixed BSODA and other non-grounded entities being affected by forces that should only affect grounded entities (Like the conveyor belt and merry-go-round).
  
• Fixed a bug where, if an entity was destroyed while on a merry-go-round (Such as an alarm clock despawning) it would cause the merry-go-round to stop affecting other entities.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused non-player entities being pushed by outside forces to move slightly faster than they should.
  
• Minor misc. fixes to the endless medium premade map.
  

Note that many of the issues listed here have been reported by players, but I have yet to reproduce them myself, so the accuracy of them might vary.

• Balloons occasionally clip into objects.
  
• NPCs will often not try to flip themselves when they are oriented opposite the player during Gravity Chaos. This can lead to strange NPC behavior.
  
• NPCs will occasionally appear to turn-around when entering open areas where a hallway bridges between two different parts of that open area.
  
• Lockdown doors near spawn can be seen snapping into the open position at game start.
  
• Principal Office door can get stuck open indefinitely if sent to detention during a flood.
  
• Dr. Reflex will not always be facing the entity he is hitting with his hammer.
  
• Dr. Reflex can squish NPCs even when they do not match his orientation during Gravity Chaos.
  
• Captions are more likely to stack on top of each other and become hard to read due to the new sound propagation system. I plan on finding a way to prevent captions from rendering on top of each other.
  
• There is no indication for when entities are about to become unsquished (Not a bug, just an issue I intend to address soon).
  
• It is possible to see out of bounds while being rotated by a gravity flipper while squished.
  
• On some screen resolutions, it is possible to see a gap through some elements on the elevator screen.
  
• Some NPCs are very annoying when they are squished.
  
• Wind and conveyor belt audio is not propagated.
  
• NPCs will occasionally end up wandering into an area they should be fleeing from.
  
• Dr. Reflex can sometimes get his hammer early while being pushed around by outside forces.
  
• NPCs will occasionally get stuck on the merry-go-round.
  
• NPCs can collide with other entities through walls, triggering their effects.
  
• Math Machine balloons can rarely get stuck behind the diagonal math machine.
  
• It is possible to escape being pushed by First Prize by pausing/unpausing the game rapidly.
  
• Principal locks all office doors when leaving his office during detention, even ones he is not leaving through, which can cause a door unlocked with keys to unexpectedly be locked again.
  
• Mrs. Pomp can ask you to come to a class room that the player is already in.
  
• One-way doors can generate directly next to lockdown doors.
  
• One-way doors can generate on top of regular swinging doors.
  
• Principal, under some circumstances, can maintain his fast speed after using the principal whistle.
  
• Stamina drops when trying to move even if the player cannot move.
  
• Whirlpools that spawn behind a closed elevator gate still pull on the player, and this can cause the player to get stuck if there are multiple whirlpools.
  
• The camera can rarely be rotated up/down when getting turned around by Dr. Reflex.
  
• Sometimes the edge of the flood water object can be seen.
  
• Dr. Reflex's sprite rarely getting tilted when pushed by multiple outside forces at once.
  
• Holding the quick map open while opening the advanced map causes a small visual issue.
  
• Arts and Crafters' echoes while attacking don't always match his orientation during the gravity event.
  
• When spawning in a level, the inventory says "Nothing" even if an item is highlighted.
  
• The wrong amount of power tubes is displayed when playing certain modes.
  
• Mrs. Pomp's map icon is awkwardly placed in some rooms.
  
• Chalkles' voice sometimes cuts out while laughing due to the audio being propagated and entering another room/going out of bounds.
  
• Going on a field trip while the "all notebooks" notification sound is playing will cause it to play a second time after returning from the field trip.
  
• A seed is displayed when playing pre-made maps.
  
• Held sprite objects, such as the math machine balloons, can be held into other areas such that their lighting noticeably changes.
  
• Mrs. Pomp doesn't wander around class rooms in pre-made maps. She just stands in a corner.
  
• Certain sound effects are delayed while the environment is frozen (Such as when Mrs. Pomp is asking the player to come to her class).
  
• Maps from saved games of Hide & Seek from older versions of the game will fill out the areas found from the previous play session, even if it doesn't match new level generation.
  
• Principal doesn't open office doors during detention while fleeing from a tape.
  
• Beans' gum will float if the surface it hit is moved away.
  
• You can look back while inside a locker.
  
• During the flood, hall swinging doors do not open, while swinging doors that lead into rooms do open.
  
• The map in Johnny's store doesn't remain sold out after buying it when replaying the same level.
  

Hello Baldi's Basics Plus players!

First off I want to say a big THANK YOU for all the great feedback I've received regarding the 0.4 update! I'm so glad that so many of you are loving the update, and I will be taking the more constructive feedback and using it to improve the game where possible.

Of course I also want to say thank you for all the bug reports that have been sent in! I would not have been able to fix so many bugs without them.

Lastly, I want to note that old mods MUST be uninstalled before you can play the new updates! Several people have reported severe issues with the new update, primarily being unable to move when starting a game, and the cause has consistently been old mods conflicting with the new version of the game. If you have mods installed and are unsure how to properly uninstall them, the easiest way is to delete the entire Baldi's Basics Plus folder installed by Steam and re-install it. It is not always enough to just re-install it or check file integrity via Steam. If you are experiencing a game breaking issue, please make sure you don't have any old mods installed.

With all that, here's the changelog for version 0.4.1, available now!

• Added an error screen to the elevator for when the level generator crashes. This screen will inform players that a crash occurred and give them instructions on how to submit a proper bug report.
  
• Mrs. Pomp no longer freezes the player in place when she first starts screaming at them.
  
• The party event now has NPCs wander around the Principal's office, rather than just stand in place.
  
• Math Machine balloons no longer have captions when they pop.
  
• Updated descriptions for explorer mode and challenges for clarity.
  
• Added a failsafe to the occlusion culling system which prevents it from crashing if an opening to an out of bounds area generates in a level.
  
• Made Kickstarter backer posters much rarer, and limited them to appear in level 1 only.
  
• Misc. code cleanup.
  

• Fixed some furniture with rotation that was misaligned around the Y-axis, allowing the player to change their height and fly over/under the level by walking into it.
  
• Fixed Mrs. Pomp being able to attack the player in rooms she cannot enter.
  
• Fixed Mrs. Pomp sometimes targeting a door that doesn't lead to a hallway.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the player to be unable to move after using a teleporter while in a locker.
  
• Fixed the floodwaters being audible at full volume for a frame when the event starts.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused entities to get stuck in the ground when getting sucked into a whirlpool at the same time a field trip is played.
  
• Fixed an oversight that allowed players to use items during field trip minigames.
  
• Fixed Arts and Crafters attack sound being louder than intended and not respecting the sound effects volume setting.
  
• Fixed propagated audio being audible at the wrong volume level for a single frame when a level finished loading.
  
• Fixed several NullReferenceException errors that would occur when quitting to the main menu (These errors had no noticeable effect on gameplay).
  
• Fixed Dr. Reflex always knowing the player's location the same frame he gets angry, even if they were out of his line of sight.
  
• Fixed Baldi's "thanks for playing!" voiceline when quitting the game not respecting the voice volume setting. If the voice volume is zero, there will be no delay when quitting.
  
• Fixed The Test being able to move while not observed when its navigation was overridden by external events, such as the party event or playing the tape/phone.
  
• Fixed a bug that allowed hall lockers to be built into rooms.
  
• Fixed the elevator and elevator gate audio sources not being propagated.
  
• Fixed the order of challenge maps on the challenges menu to properly reflect the numerical order as displayed in the elevator.
  
• Fixed Baldi's "smarter than me!" caption not being green in some contexts.
  
• Further restricted the spawn positions of whirlpools to prevent players potentially getting stuck when the event ends while they are getting pulled down into a whirlpool.
  
• Fixed several issues with pre-made maps
  
  • Fixed notebooks icons being misplaced.
    
  • Fixed the playground in the grapple challenge not having the playground room function assigned.
    
  • Added EntitySafeSpawn points to all Principal's offices in premade maps. These points are used by some game events, and without them strange behavior would occur.
    
• Fixed a bug that could cause openings to an out of bounds area to form in special rooms (Like the playground or library).
  
• Fixed an object that was not being occluded properly.
  
• Fixed posters getting placed on the fence in outdoors areas.
  
• Fixed the library being the only special room to generate in level 3. Now the cafeteria can also generate in level 3.
  

Note that many of the issues listed here have been reported by players, but I have yet to reproduce them myself, so the accuracy of them might vary.

• NPCs are able to navigate through walls in rare cases. I'm not entirely sure under what conditions this is possible, but I've seen it happen a few times now.
  
• Balloons occasionally clip outside of rooms or into objects.
  
• NPCs will often not try to flip themselves when they are oriented opposite the player during Gravity Chaos. This can lead to strange NPC behavior.
  
• NPCs will occasionally appear to turn-around when entering open areas where a hallway bridges between two different parts of that open area.
  
• Lockdown doors near spawn can be seen snapping into the open position at game start.
  
• Principal Office door can get stuck open indefinitely if sent to detention during a flood.
  
• Dr. Reflex will not always be facing the entity he is hitting with his hammer.
  
• Dr. Reflex can squish NPCs even when they do not match his orientation during Gravity Chaos.
  
• Captions are more likely to stack on top of each other and become hard to read due to the new sound propagation system. I plan on finding a way to prevent captions from rendering on top of each other.
  
• There is no indication for when entities are about to become unsquished (Not a bug, just an issue I intend to address soon).
  
• It is possible to see out of bounds while being rotated by a gravity flipper while squished.
  
• On some screen resolutions, it is possible to see a gap through some elements on the elevator screen.
  
• Some NPCs are very annoying when they are squished.
  
• Wind and conveyor belt audio is not propagated.
  
• NPCs will occasionally end up wandering into an area they should be fleeing from.
  
• Dr. Reflex can sometimes get his hammer early while being pushed around by outside forces.
  
• NPCs will occasionally get stuck on the merry-go-round.
  
• NPCs can collide with other entities through walls, triggering their effects.
  
• Math Machine balloons can rarely get stuck behind the diagonal math machine.
  
• It is possible to escape being pushed by First Prize by pausing/unpausing the game rapidly.
  
• Using a BSODA to push an entity that is being pushed by a conveyor belt/wind in the direction the belt/wind is moving will cause it to pass through the entity.
  
• Math Machine balloons can end up outside of their correct room sometimes.
  
• Principal locks all office doors when leaving his office during detention, even ones he is not leaving through, which can cause a door unlocked with keys to unexpectedly be locked again.
  
• Mrs. Pomp can ask you to come to a class room that the player is already in.
  
• One-way doors can generate directly next to lockdown doors.
  
• One-way doors can generate on top of regular swinging doors.
  
• Principal, under some circumstances, can maintain his fast speed after using the principal whistle.
  
• Stamina drops when trying to move even if the player cannot move.
  
• Whirlpools that spawn behind a closed elevator gate still pull on the player, and this can cause the player to get stuck if there are multiple whirlpools.
  
• The camera can rarely be rotated up/down when getting turned around by Dr. Reflex.
  
• Sometimes the edge of the flood water object can be seen.
  
• Dr. Reflex's sprite rarely getting tilted when pushed by multiple outside forces at once.
  
• Holding the quick map open while opening the advanced map causes a small visual issue.
  
• Arts and Crafters' echoes while attacking don't always match his orientation during the gravity event.
  
• When spawning in a level, the inventory says "Nothing" even if an item is highlighted.
  
• The wrong amount of power tubes is displayed when playing certain modes.
  
• Mrs. Pomp's map icon is awkwardly placed in some rooms.
  
• Chalkles' voice sometimes cuts out while laughing due to the audio being propagated and entering another room/going out of bounds.
  
• Going on a field trip while the "all notebooks" notification sound is playing will cause it to play a second time after returning from the field trip.
  
• A seed is displayed when playing pre-made maps.
  
• Held sprites objects, such as the math machine balloons, can be held into other areas such that their lighting noticeably changes.
  
• Mrs. Pomp doesn't wander around class rooms in pre-made maps. She just stands in a corner.
  
• Certain sound effects are delayed while the environment is frozen (Such as when Mrs. Pomp is asking the player to come to her class).
  
• Maps from saved games of Hide & Seek from older versions of the game will fill out the areas found from the previous play session, even if it doesn't match new level generation.
  
• Principal doesn't open office doors during detention while fleeing from a tape.
  
• Beans' gum will float if the surface it hit is moved away.
  
• You can look back while inside a locker.
  
• Dr. Reflex is moved slightly faster by wind/conveyor belts than he should.
  
• During the flood, hall swinging doors do not open, while swinging doors that lead into rooms do open.
  
• The map in Johnny's store doesn't remain sold out after buying it when replaying the same level.
  

I'm very happy to announce that Baldi's Basics Plus version 0.4 is available right now! I know it's been a long wait, but this update brings with it a lot of changes that not only make for a significantly better gameplay experience, but also a much smoother development experience on my end. That means that you all will get more content more often. Approximately every two months to be exact!

To celebrate the release of version 0.4, let's do some math!

0.4 X $9.99 = $3.996...

and then $9.99 - 3.996 = 5.994...

Round that to two decimal places to get...

$5.99!

That's right, Baldi's Basics Plus is on sale at 40% off for two weeks! That's the lowest price it's ever had!

I sincerely want to thank you all for your patience. I'm very excited for this new chapter of the game's development and can't wait to show you all what I have planned.

With all that said, here's the changelog. Get ready, this one's a doozy!

• Added a new character, Dr. Reflex!
  
  • Dr. Reflex wanders around and chases the player if he sees them. When he reaches them, he makes them take a reflex test which involves quickly clicking a circle icon he lifts up with random timing.
    
    • Successfully completing the test awards some YTPs. There is no penalty for failing other than wasted time, as Dr. Reflex will keep giving you another chance until you win.
  • Unlike other NPCs, Dr. Reflex can only see the player if they are in his line of sight.
    
  • During this test, the player can still move freely. If they leave before the test is finished, Dr. Reflex becomes upset and heads back to his examination room.
    
  • Once there, he grabs a giant percussion hammer and hunts for the player. He hears sounds made by the player and will use them to track them down. As he hunts, he will squish any NPCs he encounters with his hammer.
    
  • This continues until he finds and squishes the player. After this he returns to his default wandering state with a short cooldown.
    
  • The more times you take Dr. Reflex's test in a level, the more difficult/time consuming they become.
    
  • For all 0.4.X versions of the game, Dr. Reflex will be guaranteed to spawn in level 2. In later major updates, he will be set to have a random chance of spawning similar to the other characters.
    
  • Unlike other NPCs, Dr. Reflex can only see the player if they are in his line of sight.
    
• Added the squished status effect. When the player is squished, they cannot interact with most objects in a level. When an NPC is squished, they cannot trigger their usual effects when colliding with other entities.
  
• Ambience was added to outdoor areas.
  
• Several custom made rooms have been added to the game for the new level generator changes (See below for more info)
  
• Pre-made hallway areas can now be loaded into levels alongside the standard generated hallways. This allows for more interesting level layouts.
  
• Added a callout when all notebooks are collected notifying the player that they now must exit the level.
  
• Added a button to the about screen that opens the game's save folder (May not work on all platforms).
  
• Added a new door texture for the Principal's office.
  
• Added several new objects for level décor: A computer, filing cabinets, bookshelves and a new desk.
  
• Added an echo audio effect when entering the library.
  

• Tweaked Principal of the Thing
  
  • The Principal now knocks on faculty room doors a few seconds before entering them.
    
  • The Principal will now quickly open and close the Principal's office doors during detention when entering or leaving the room, instead of just passing through them.
    
  • Individual rule breaks now have their own timing for how long the Principal must see the player before he will get angry at them.
    
• Tweaked Beans.
  
  • Added previously unused sound effects for when Beans is about to spit gum, when the gum is moving through the air, and when it hits an object.
    
  • The gum overlay is now rendered behind other HUD elements.
    
  • Beans' now runs away from his gum once it hits something.
    
• Tweaked Playtime.
  
  • Playtime will end jump rope if she loses sight of the player at any point.
    
  • Playtime no longer ends jump rope based on the player moving a certain distance. This functionality was made obsolete by the above change since moving far enough away causes Playtime to lose sight of the player.
    
• Tweaked It's a Bully.
  
  • The Bully no longer drops below the level when he leaves. Instead, the relevant components are simply disabled.
    
  • NPCs are now blocked by the Bully and must navigate around him,
    
  • The Bully now pushes entities that collide with him away instead of just being an impassible collider. This means it is now possible to pass through the Bully with enough speed.
    
• Tweaked Chalkles.
  
  • Chalkles no longer instantly cools down when leaving a room. Instead, it cools down over time the player is not in any of its rooms.
    
  • Chalkles can now spawn in faculty rooms, though a smaller percentage of them than class rooms.
    
• Sound is now propagated through levels by wrapping around walls, rather than just passing through everything. For example, if you are in a room with only one entrance, all sounds you hear will sound as if they are coming through the door, regardless of where the character is relative to you.
  
• The shape, size and contents of rooms are no longer procedurally generated. All rooms are now designed by hand and then loaded into levels procedurally. This allows for more interesting, better designed rooms to be added to the game.
  
  • Some objects in rooms can be randomized such that there is a chance they will be replaced by another object (E.g. BSODA machines in the cafeteria have a chance to be changed to a Zesty machine or, rarely, a crazy vending machine).
    
• Math Machines are now placed closer to the walls so that players cannot hide behind them.
  
• Made improvements to the map.
  
  • Tiles are now filled in with a transparent background to make it easier to tell the difference between actual rooms and empty space.
    
  • Changed room colors to better reflect the danger level of each room type (Class rooms are green, faculty rooms are red, etc.).
    
  • Added icons to the background of rooms when viewing the advanced map to make it more obvious what kind of room it is and improve color blindness accessibility.
    
  • Doors now have proper icons on the map which show if a door is locked or not.
    
  • Windows also have a proper indicator on the map.
    
  • Map icons for things like items and notebooks now stay right-side-up no matter how the map is oriented.
    
  • Elevators are now indicated on the map with an up arrow. This turns green when open and becomes a red "X" when the elevator is locked.
    
• The library no longer generates as a maze, and is instead a premade room like the others.
  
• The backer credits have been completely reworked with several improvements.
  
  • Names are now sorted alphabetically to make it easier to find a specific name.
    
  • Backer credits are now displayed with a pixelized font like text in the rest of the game.
    
  • The way credits are loaded has been changed to make it easier to add or change names.
    
• Math Machine balloons now drop down a little when they can be interacted. This makes it easier to tell which balloon you will grab when interacting with one.
  
• Adjusted the way items are placed in levels.
  
• The Energy Flavored Zesty Bar now makes a crunching sound when used.
  
• Changed the BSODA sprite to something more in-line with the game's current graphical standard and that can be seen through so it doesn't block the player's view.
  
  • The BSODA sprite is also randomly rotated when spawned.
    
• BSODA can now push the player, but only if they re-enter the trigger after exiting it.
  
• The alarm clock is now an entity and can be moved by outside forces.
  
• Playtime's music and the party music are now categorized as sound effects and will not have their volume adjusted by the music volume setting.
  
• Several NPCs now unlock locked doors when they pass through them. These NPCs include Baldi, the Principal and Mrs. Pomp.
  
• The tape player/pay phone now causes all NPCs to flee from it (Unless they are aggroed) alongside its old behavior of preventing sounds from being heard while it's playing.
  
• The flood waters during the flood event can now be seen from underneath. When the camera is underneath, there is also an underwater visual effect that limits how far you can see. You cannot be seen by NPCs while under water.
  
• Increased the launch and initial pull speeds of the grappling hook.
  
• Improved the appearance of the mystery room.
  
• Improved the placement of buttons in levels.
  
• The merry-go-round can now be walked on and it will spin any entities that are on it.
  
• Increased the speed of the roto-hall, and made it spin in the direction that will get it to the next valid position the fastest.
  
• Conveyor belts now only generate on Hide & Seek level 3.
  
• Safety Scissors now work against multiple things at once. Using them while playing jump rope and covered in gum will clear both for example.
  
• Misc. game balance changes.
  

• Created a new entities system used by nearly all moving objects with collision. Things like the player, NPCs, BSODA spray, math machine balloons, etc. now move via one unified system. This means interactions with and between entities are much more consistent and it opens more possibilities for emergent gameplay. It also means status effects, such as being squished, can easily be created such that all entities are able to have them.
  
  • All entities except for the player use a custom made collision detection system when calculating movement. The player uses Unity's built-in CharacterController component as it always has.
    
  • One new feature of this system is the ability to apply a force with frame rate independent acceleration to entities. This is useful for applying quick bursts of movement to entities, such as with the Bully's new pushing mechanic.
    
  • Physics updates are now called manually in order to work with the new entity system.
    
• Converted all NPCs and NPC navigation to a new state machine system.
  
  • The NPC state machine allows me to more easily program and bug fix complex behaviors.
    
  • The navigation state machine allows for more dynamic NPC behavior when conditions that alter how an NPC should behave are present (E.g. the party at the principal's office event).
    
• Created a custom occlusion culling system that prevents most areas that cannot be seen at any given moment and the objects in those areas from being rendered. This significantly improves performance and ensures it remains consistent, especially on larger levels.
  
  • This system is capable of re-calculating occlusion data during gameplay, so changes to the level layout (E.g. using a portal poster) will be respected by the culling system.
    
• Completely reworked the way level layout data is managed. "Cells" are now used to hold navigation and other important data, "tiles" are now just the 3D models the levels are made of. Previously cell data was tied to the tile objects. These improvements paved the way for faster level generation and loading as well as properly enabling the level layout to be changed during gameplay.
  
• Improvements to the way cell navigation data is checked when pathfinding.
  
• NPCs can now navigate through out of bounds areas if they somehow end up in them. They will try to navigate back in bounds if this happens.
  
• Changes made to level generator allowing for the new pre-made room system to work.
  
• Level loading is no longer based on the frame rate. Now, the level loader/generator will do as much as it can in a single frame before yielding to let the next fame begin. This allows levels to load much more quickly while still keeping the game responsive.
  
• Created a new room function system which allows me to easily add and change functionality for specific rooms (For example, to trigger the silence effect when entering the library or ambient noise when in certain rooms). This new system is based on player position, rather than colliding with a trigger as it worked previously.
  
  • This new system also opens the possibility to affect NPCs and/or entities as well as players.
    
• Improvements to door placement.
  
• Improvements to room distribution (E.g. a level is less likely to place all class rooms on one side of a level).
  
• Improvements to the system which prevents objects from generating on top of other objects.
  
• The level generator will now reuse matching room texture atlases instead of generating several identical room texture atlases. This improves load times and reduces memory usage.
  
• Other misc. level generation improvements.
  
• Implemented a Dijkstra map manager that is used for things like sound propagation, getting NPCs to flee locations, level generation, etc.
  

Note: Due to how long it's been since the last public update, I may accidentally list bug fixes for bugs that were introduced and then fixed internally between 0.3.8 and 0.4. Similarly, there may be some bugs that were fixed as a side effect of the extensive changes I've made, but that are not listed here since I didn't note them as bug fixes in my Git history.

• Disabled MacOS auto graphics API and added OpenGLCore as a supported graphics API. This will hopefully resolve an issue that caused graphics to not render on some older devices. If you notice any significant issues on MacOS with this update, please let me know as testing for this change has been minimal.
  
• The game's resolution can no longer be set to a width below 480 and/or a height below 360. This fixes a bug where setting the resolution lower than that would make the menus unusable.
  
• Fixed NPCs occasionally clipping through objects when navigating through open areas.
  
• Fixed Steam Input not switching to the "Interface" action set when finishing a round of endless mode.
  
• Fixed being able to get teleported into parts of rooms that cannot be escaped by assigning designated safe spawn locations to rooms.
  
• Fixed whirlpools being able to spawn in unreachable areas.
  
• Fixed the floodwaters running at half the frame rate when they were rising at the beginning of the flood event.
  
• Fixed being able to endlessly scroll the credits past the beginning.
  
• Made several improvements to NPC navigation to prevent them from turning around in certain situations when it makes no sense to do so (For example, sometimes NPCs chasing the player would see them enter a room, walk up to the door, and then immediately turn around instead of entering the room).
  
• Fixed Gotta Sweep occasionally not returning to his closet when done sweeping.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused Baldi to not move quite right when being slowed down or sped up by an outside force.
  
• Fixed a divide by zero error that could occur in some scenarios with characters like Gotta Sweep. This issue may have been responsible for some strange game freezing bugs reported by some users. In doing so, I also improved the smoothness of the pushing effect.
  
• Fixed some billboarded sprites updating their rotation with a one-frame delay.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused doors to play opening and closing sounds twice at the exact same time.
  
  • Fun fact: At the time this was fixed, it was probably the oldest unfixed bug in the game!
    
• Fixed issues with Arts and Crafters' attack animation.
  
• Fixed lockdown doors z-fighting with the skybox.
  
• Fixed Baldi being able to collide with the player through walls.
  
• Made improvements to level generation that should better prevent areas the player can get permanently trapped in from generating.
  
• The roto-hall will spin entities inside of it while it rotates. This prevents being able to clip inside of it, getting stuck.
  
• Fixed the controller vibrating when inside the library.
  
• Fixed a bug that made it hard if not impossible to use safety scissors on First Prize while being pushed. The safety scissors will now cut his wires while being pushed, even if not facing him.
  
• Fixed multi-angle sprites, such as those used by First Prize and The Test, rotating the wrong way when upside down.
  

These are changes made between the pre-release and public release of 0.4.

• Decreased the starting pitch of Dr. Reflex saying "THIIIIINK FAST!"
  
• Decreased the volume of Arts and Crafters' sounds.
  

These are bugs that were present in the pre-release version of 0.4 that I have fixed for the public release.

• Fixed Dr. Reflex continuing to say "THIIIIIIIII..." even after losing the player.
  
• Fixed apples not getting knocked down from trees with the grappling hook.
  
• Fixed the Bully not being seeable by the Principal.
  
• Fixed CoreGameManager audio, like Baldi's "all notebooks" notification, continuing to play when loading a level.
  
• Fixed the elevator screen being displayed when visiting what's left of the farm.
  
• Fixed portal posters not allowing sound through.
  
• Fixed NPCs not re-routing when placing a portal poster that opens a shorter path to their destination.
  
• Fixed Dr. Reflex entering an endless "THIIIIIIIII..." loop if the party event started while he was chasing the player.
  
• Fixed conveyor belts, Cloudy Copter's wind, whirlpools and Gotta Sweep only moving the player and NPCs. They will now affect all entities accordingly.
  
• Fixed Arts and Crafters' audio frequently cutting out during his attack animation.
  
• Fixed Mrs. Pomp stomping rapidly for several frames when she spawns.
  
• Fixed non-grounded entities not flipping upside down properly when squished.
  
• Fixed plants generating inside lockers.
  
• Fixed the counter and examination table in Dr. Reflex's clinic not carving the NavMesh, allowing NPCs to walk through them.
  
• Fixed Beans wandering weirdly in open areas when switching between walking and running.
  

• Removed the farm field trip until further notice as it is currently broken. I have plans to revamp field trips one more time, so instead of fixing it only to replace it later, I've decided to just disable it for now.
  
• Removed several unused and obsolete scripts/assets.
  

• NPCs are able to go through walls in rare cases, seemingly between adjacent open areas. I'm not entirely under what conditions this is possible, but I've seen it happen a couple of times now.
  
• Balloons occasionally clip outside of rooms.
  
• NPCs will often not try to flip themselves when they are oriented opposite the player during Gravity Chaos. This can lead to strange NPC behavior.
  
• NPCs will occasionally appear to turn-around when entering open areas where a hallway bridges between two different parts of that open area.
  
• Lockdown doors near spawn can be seen snapping into the open position at game start.
  
• Principal Office door can rarely get stuck open.
  
• Dr. Reflex will not always be facing the entity he is hitting with his hammer.
  
• Dr. Reflex can squish NPCs even when they do not match his orientation during Gravity Chaos.
  
• Dr. Reflex will always know where the player is the moment he becomes angry, even if he cannot see them.
  
• Captions are more likely to stack on top of each other and become hard to read due to the new sound propagation system. I plan on finding a way to prevent captions from rendering on top of each other.
  
• There is no indication for when entities are about to become unsquished (Not a bug, just an issue I intend to address soon).
  
• It is possible to see out of bounds while being rotated by a gravity flipper while squished.
  
• On some screen resolutions, it is possible to see a gap through some elements on the elevator screen.
  
• Some NPCs are very annoying when they are squished.
  
• Notebook icons are not positioned correctly on the map in pre-made levels.
  
• Wind and conveyor belt audio is not propagated.
  
• NPCs will occasionally end up wandering into an area they should be fleeing from.
  
• Dr. Reflex can sometimes get his hammer early while being pushed around by outside forces.
  
• NPCs will occasionally get stuck on the merry-go-round.
  

Whew, that's a big list! As always, if you encounter any bugs that I don't know about please do so on the pinned bug report thread here.

So what's next? Well as I get around to fixing bugs I'll push out a few minor updates. If there are any super game breaking bugs, I'll fix those ASAP, but otherwise you can expect bug fixes to be released about a week apart as needed. Meanwhile, I'll also be busy working on new content for 0.5, which will release around the end of April/beginning of May. I hope you all will look forward to that!

Hello everyone!

This is going to be a small status update, but I just wanted to let you all know that I'm ready to announce that Baldi's Basics Plus version 0.4 will finally release on February 26... At the latest!

The update is nearly ready to go. The one thing that's holding it back is Dr. Reflex's animation work, which is taking longer than anticipated. I was hoping to be finished taking photos by now, but I ended up having to redo a couple of animations so I'm not quite there yet. I think I'll be able to finish this week though! After that I'll have to edit every single photo, which will involve removing the greenscreen, manually editing out any other artifacts, making sure everything is lined up properly, making everything low res and dithered, etc. There are a few hundred frames of animation to go through, so I'm not quite sure how long that step will take me. I hope you all end up liking the final result because this is the most effort I've ever put into a character's visuals!

So that's why I'm saying February 26 at the latest. With that date I'll have plenty of time to ensure everything is ready to go, but there's a chance that, if things go really well over the next couple of weeks, I may be able to release it a bit earlier!

Of course, once this update releases that will mark the beginning of the new update schedule of a major update every two months, so you can expect version 0.5 to release around the end of April/beginning of May. I myself am not sure what will be in these future updates, I'm just going to be working on developing the new content I have planned and I'll ship whatever is ready in each major update. This means that they will vary in size, but they will always contain something new to discover. There will also be no more delays since I won't be holding updates back to finish certain features! If something isn't ready yet, it will just be saved for the next major update.

That's it for this small status update about a BIG game update! Thanks again for all the support!

Hello Baldi's Basics Plus players!

First off I'd like to apologize for the lack of updates here on Steam. I have been posting status updates to the game's Kickstarter every two months for over a year now, but it didn't occur to me until recently that I should be sharing that news with everyone here as well!

If you'd like to see what you've missed, all previous status updates can be viewed on the Kickstarter's updates page.

I will be posting the latest update right here though! In it I discuss a big new feature coming to the game and the next character to be added, who will make their debut in version 0.4! When is 0.4 releasing you ask? Soon! February 2024 at the latest, but possibly sooner. Keep reading for more details!


Something I've never been super happy about with Baldi's Basics is the way sound works. Unity's built-in audio system is very basic and so it can't do much beyond very simple attenuation and panning based on a sound's location relative to the camera. This means that sounds have always ignored the level layout and passed right through walls. I'm sure many of you have noticed that in the game you can hear anything that's nearby even if there are several walls between you and the source of the sound that should affect it. What I've always wanted to do was have sounds wrap around the walls so that players hear where they are coming from, not where they are. For a stealth game, this sort of sound propagation is a big deal.

For example, if you're in a room with a single door, all sounds from outside should be heard coming from the doorway. Even if the source of that sound is closer to the wall opposite the door, the sound should only be able to pass through an opening, not a wall. There are plugins available that try to solve this problem, but many of them either don't work with procedurally generated scenes or utilize expensive (On the CPU, not expensive monetarily) raycasting techniques to achieve a more realistic sound, which would be overkill for Baldi's Basics. I have for a long time felt that, due to the simple grid-based nature of Baldi's Basics levels, there had to be a good way to achieve what I wanted, and while I had several ideas on how to tackle the problem myself they were either too complex to tackle any time soon or would put too much work on the CPU and hurt performance.

That is until I stumbled upon a sort of algorithm/technique sometimes referred to as Dijkstra maps! Without getting too technical, this technique involves creating a sort of map that points to the shortest path to the player's location from any other location in the level. You only have to generate this map once whenever the the player moves or whenever the level layout changes, and then it can be used by as many things that need it as often as they need it. This means that the game can calculate what route a sound needs to take to reach the player very quickly, much more quickly than other pathfinding algorithms, which means lots of sounds can be processed at once without impacting performance!


In this screenshot, you can see this system in action! The lines from Baldi are an approximation of the shortest path from him to the player (Who is at the red X). The audio source gets placed at the end of the cyan line so that the sound can be heard coming from the door, even though Baldi is technically in the opposite direction.

I was able to develop, polish, and debug this system in just over a week. Performance testing shows it runs just as well as I was hoping. I was not expecting to get this done so early, but now it's likely it will be yet another big improvement to the game that will ship with Baldi's Basics Plus version 0.4!

You might be wondering, besides the fact that it's really cool, what is the point of this? Well there are several reasons why I believe this is a big improvement over the way audio used to be:

• Sounds you hear are now more relevant - Just because you hear Baldi on the other side of a wall doesn't necessarily mean he's close to you. There might be a long winding path between you and him. With this system, you will now only hear sounds from things that are truly close to you!
  
• You can now hear where sounds are coming from - With the old system, you can roughly tell where a sound is, but not necessarily which direction it's coming from. With sound propagation, you can better tell which way to go to get closer to, or run away from, a sound.
  
• It makes captions less overpowered - Many people have noted that captions are a bit overpowered in their current form since they not only point to where a sound is at, but easily visualize how it's moving as well. Captions have been updated to reflect the new sound propagation system so now they don't provide as big of an unintended advantage while still providing useful info for those who need them to play the game properly.
  
• It improves the game's atmosphere - The game is now a bit more quiet overall which, combined with other factors, raises tensions a bit more.
  

Sound design is one of my biggest passions in game dev so I could keep going on about how excited I am about this feature, but I'll go ahead and move onto revealing the next character!


If you're trying to avoid seeing the new character before 0.4 comes out, turn back now! If not, scroll down!

Oh, and please be mindful when discussing the new character online by posting spoiler warnings as well so that people who don't want spoilers can more easily avoid them!























As many of you guessed, the next character will be Dr. Reflex, who I first talked about way back in a Kickstarter update I posted just a week after launching this campaign! I mentioned that the name was "definitely pending" but I ultimately just decided to leave it as-is haha.


What I didn't leave as-is are his game mechanics! The character works very differently than what I initially described in that previous post, as the idea evolved a lot since then. Dr. Reflex wanders around the school just like any other character, and when he sees you he'll rush over and, if he catches you, force you to take a reflex test in the form of a timing minigame. After a few moments he'll open up both of his hands and you'll need to quickly click on the correct one (Obviously there will be an indicator showing which hand is correct, but I haven't settled on what that will look like quite yet). If you click the wrong one or take too long to react the minigame will reset, and it will continue until you win, which will earn you some YTPs!


You might be thinking that that sounds a lot like Playtime, but Dr. Reflex has a big difference that sets him apart. Unlike with Playtime, you aren't held in place and can just walk away whenever you want. Baldi getting too close to wait for the test to begin? Just walk away! What negative consequence could you possibly face for leaving before completing the test?


Well that's when Dr. Reflex gets really interesting! If you leave before completing the test, Dr. Reflex will get angry and head back to his clinic (A special room that will generate in levels he is in) and grab a giant percussion hammer (You know, one of those weird reflex test hammers doctors hit your knee with). With this in hand, he will begin hunting you down, and if he catches you he will hit you with it several times and squish you!


When you're squished, your character will be half their regular height, and the things you'll be able to interact with will become limited. You'll still be able to open doors and solve math machines, but you won't be able to hit buttons, pick up items and notebooks or enter lockers among other things. This effect will wear off after some time, so you'll have to be extra careful until you regain your normal height.


You're not the only one who can get squished though! In his fury, Dr. Reflex will squish any character he comes across, including Baldi himself! When a character is squished, their interaction with you will be limited. So, for example, Baldi won't be able to end the game, Principal of the Thing won't be able to send you to detention, etc. If other characters get squished, make sure you take advantage of the situation!

Once Dr. Reflex squishes the player, he will return to normal and, after a cooldown, the cycle will repeat.

Dr. Reflex's programming is already pretty much complete. From what playtesting I've done, he can create some really funny - and terrifying - scenarios, so I can't wait for when you all will be able to meet him in-game!


What's not complete is the artwork and sounds. Similar to First Prize, Dr. Reflex will have a sprite that rotates based on what angle you are seeing him from. This is not only cool looking, but it's also important for gameplay as, unlike other Baldi's Basics characters, he can only see you if you are in front of him or in his periphery.

The difference though is that his sprites will be animated! I explained some of this in an earlier update, but the plan is to use stop motion to animate him from eight different angles, which is looking to be a lot of work, but I think it will be worth the effort! I haven't done any animation yet, so for now I just have these static placeholder sprites to show off.

I also have yet to do voicework. I haven't settled on how I want him to sound yet, all I know is that his catchphrase will be "Thiiiiiiink... Fast!" which he'll yell as he first chases you down and starts his minigame.

I think that's about everything there is to know about Dr. Reflex at the moment. So, I'll wrap this status update up!

Recently I said that a January release for Baldi's Basics version 0.4 was a pretty safe bet, and I'd say that's still likely! However I have yet to sit down and make a bunch of rooms for the new level generator (Largely due to sound propagation stealing my attention for a bit!), so between still needing to do that and Dr. Reflex's animation work, things may take a tiny bit longer. 0.4 will come out in February at the latest, but January is still a real possibility. I will keep everyone updated as we get closer to those dates.

Aside from all that, I've also been doing the usual bug fixing and polishing as needed. The changelog for 0.4 is going to be massive haha.

Thanks to everyone for you support and patience!