PogoChamp News

Inspired by [insert heist movie], this level has it all, laser grids, disabling alarms, jumping through windows, a getaway car, you name it!


The level takes place in a museum, so I added a bunch of pogo-themed museum pieces like: The Pogosaurus!

Thanks a ton to WaltzingDucks for playtesting the level and telling me all the things he found frustrating about it. The level is definitely more fun after that round of feedback.


A few months back I contacted Bennet Foddy about making a level that was an homage to his game Getting Over It with Bennet Foddy. He approved, and I started working on a level based on the beginning of Getting Over It. Work on the level stalled out for a bit because, like the game that inspired it, it was REALLY HARD and pretty finicky/frustrating. I shelved the idea for a while but this week I realized that I could mitigate some of the more frustrating parts of the level by just giving you a jetpack.

Let me know what you think about the new levels in the comments here or on Discord!

FYI: I'll be on a trip for a few days, and won't be able to post a new update next week!

• GAMEPLAY: Update Tumbler geometry to be less annoying / more reliable. The geometry is different enough that it's technically a "new level", and so your scores and the leaderboard for it will be reset. Sorry!
  
• CONTENT: New level: The Heist (#78).
  
• UX: Line color when looking through walls is now easier to see through.
  
• ACHIEVEMENTS: Added "Om Nom Nom" achievement (still needs icon).
  
• CONTENT: New level: Get Over It (#69)
  
• ACHIEVEMENTS: Added "Getting Over It" achievement.
  
• DEV: Various work on the final level.
  
• THE HEIST: Diamond case is lower to the ground.
• THE HEIST: Diamond pickup hitbox is now the same size as the shatter hitbox.
• THE HEIST: Alarm disabler button is bigger and looks like a button.
• THE HEIST: Alarm disabler button falls down more consistently when touched.
• THE HEIST: Alarm disabler doesn't kill you if you hit your head.
• THE HEIST: Removed construction sign from broken window.
• THE HEIST: Goal zone now contains the car instead of being inside it.
• THE HEIST: Adjusted initial laser wall positions so it's easier to jump through.
• THE HEIST: Adjusted laser circle wall distance to be slightly farther away so you're less likely to slide into it.
• THE HEIST: Doorway when existing laser area is wider.
• THE HEIST: Ceiling above laser area is smaller so you're less likely to bonk when trying to jump down.
• THE HEIST: Player character is a bit brighter.

I spent this week working on a new level that has gotten a little bit out of hand. The idea for the level is that it's a diamond heist, and it made sense to me for that to take place inside a museum, so I've been working on a bunch of museum-y decorations.

[h3]Pogosaurus Rex[/h3]


[h3]This Is Not A Pogo[/h3]

And more! Hopefully it won't take me too much longer to finish the level, and you'll be able to find all of the other pogo-themed artwork / jokes for yourself.


PogoChamp has a page on speedrun.com! I've set it up with 2 categories: "All Levels Complete" and "All Rainbow Gems". I know it's a little weird to have full-game speedruns given that I keep adding new levels to the game, but I think it's still fun. If you have ideas for additional speedrun categories, let me know!

• UX: Added progress indicator to "Hold to skip" popups that appear when cutscenes are playing.
  
• DEV: Lots of work on the new level, but it's not finished yet.
  

I hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving break, mine was pretty cool. I got my Dad to play PogoChamp for the first time. He pretty much mastered the "beat a level without touching the joystick" strategy (he's 80). Overall the break was a nice rest, and I feel recharged and have a bunch of ideas for new levels! Currently all the new level stuff is in-progress, so nothing to show quite yet, but I did fix a whole bunch of bugs this week. My time is also still split between PogoChamp and FeedbackBot, so there's not quite the cadence of new PogoChamp stuff that there was back in September/October.

[h2]Speedrun??[/h2]
I decided to submit PogoChamp to speedrun.com, and as part of their submission form you need to include a speedrun of the game, so here's my "All levels complete (85)" run, which took 27:37.70 based on the in-game timer (which doesn't include things like navigating the level select, etc).
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]If you haven't seen all the levels yet, this is a pretty quick way to see them all! Based on the in-game timer it was just under 20 seconds per level!

• BUG FIX: REGRESSION: Button prompts were always Xbox style no matter which controller you user using. Now it properly defaults to Xbox style only if it's not some other type.
  
• BUG FIX: You no longer lose menu focus in Level Select when you skip a cutscene using B (it worked fine when you used A, lol).
  
• BUG FIX: Pausing & unpausing in Level Select could cause the "Main Menu" hotkey (B/esc) to stop working.
  
• BUG FIX: You can no longer pause during cutscenes (the start button now properly triggers the "hold to skip" UI).
  
• BUG FIX: Resetting progress from the profiles menu didn't clear cached values for star times or gates opened.
  
• BUG FIX: Resetting progress from the game mode selection menu caused the menu to lose focus when using a controller.
  
• UI: Minor UI adjustments so that the speedrun timer doesn't overlap with the "Hold X to skip" in cutscenes or the total star count.
  
• BUG FIX: REGRESSION: In The Classic, if you jumped too far to the right, the camera would freak out and just show the sky.
  
• BUG FIX: In The Classic, the wall on the right side of the level overlapped the "instant kill" boundary, so you'd instantly die if you touched it. You can now jump off of it properly.
  
• BUG FIX: In The Classic, the camera didn't reach all the way to the wall on the right side of the level. It now matches up properly.
  

This week I really only worked on some minor Linux support issues. There are still a few issues remaining, like certain shaders not displaying properly (conveyor belts!), and a weird issue where half the text in the UI just disappeared for unknown reasons.

I'll be skipping the Weekly Progress Report next week due to Thanksgiving. I'll be away from my development PC for most of the week, so won't have time to make any real changes. But there is good news! I'll be having [read: "forcing"] some of my family to play PogoChamp for the first time, and any time I run a playtest with brand new players it gives me some good ideas for new levels / improvements, so look forward to those in the coming weeks.

• BUG FIX: Fix bug when NVIDIA Highlights is not available that caused it to log errors repeatedly.
  
• BUG FIX: Controllers that reported their device type as "Gamepad" now display Xbox-style button prompts (instead of error icons).
  

This week was mostly a week off, but I did manage to make a pretty significant performance improvement/bug fix. I took some time off of PogoChamp this week to work on a different project I made: FeedbackBot. A Discord policy change means that I need to rewrite the bot before April 2022. Since I didn't have any great level ideas for PogoChamp right now, I figured I'd start working on that rewrite while I think of some new ideas. I've also been playing a bunch of Forza, lol.


Something that had been on my "I should look into this" list for a long time was that the performance of the Level Select area was actually pretty bad, especially while moving on laptops or other mid/low-end computers. I'd known about this for a long time, but hadn't actually decided to look into it until early this week.

So I popped open the Level Select and Unity's Stats panel and saw this:

Pretty much all of the geometry in the game is made out of VERY simple shapes. Almost everything is made out of a few hundred or a few thousand vertices, and while the Level Select is big, it's not 112.7 MILLION vertices worth of "big".

After some quick binary search (turning off half the objects in the scene, then checking the number of verts, repeat until culprit found), I found the culprit:

It turns out each one of these visual effects used around 500 particles (100 per ring, 5 rings). That's a pretty reasonable number right? 500 particles x 100 entry points is only 50,000 particles. Well the problem was that I'd set the "capacity" in the VFX graph to.... 320,000. So about 640 times as much as I actually needed. Simply turning the capacity down to a reasonable amount (512) resulted in around a 99% reduction in vertices.

After a few other small tweaks to lower the numbers even more, these are the results:


It just goes to show, sometimes the solutions are pretty simple (because you caused them by being stupid in the first place).

• PERF: Drastically improved FPS/performance of the Level Select.
  
• UX: Added some hint text on The Pits and Repeater if you haven't completed the level yet and crash a lot of times. Should help people who are struggling to understand the jump mechanics".
  
• DEV: Experimenting with Linux support.
  
• DEV: Experimenting with Character Customization.