Weekly Progress Report #27
Steam Game Festival Review
The Steam Game Festival ended on Tuesday this week. Overall I think the event was great! PogoChamp didn't set the world on fire, but it did catch the attention of some people who seemed to really enjoy it. I received several messages from people who played the demo telling me they loved the game, and are excited to see more of it. In terms of quantitative metrics, wishlists for the game nearly doubled during the game festival:
Demo Availability & Early Access
In the lead up to the game festival, my plan was for the demo to only be available for a limited time, but after making changes throughout the demo period I've decided to leave it up indefinitely. In the near term, I won't be pushing updates to the demo build, and will instead be working on the "full" build for the Early Access launch. My plan is to release Early Access toward the end of March 2021, and at that time I'll update the demo build as well.
Leaderboards and Difficulty
When I originally assigned the star ratings for each level, my logic was as follows:
- 1-Star: You beat the level.
- 2-Star: You beat the level well, demonstrating good understanding of the mechanics.
- 3-Star: You beat the level extremely well, demonstrating master of the mechanics, including consistent super-jumps.
Part of the reason I did this was as a way to show new players that there were clearly "advanced techniques" to use, and encourage them to experiment to try to get faster times. This also served as a way to get some of the early playtesters to see how far they could push their speeds.
Once I added the leaderboard, it became pretty clear to me that the the leaderboard scores are actually a better way to convey the mechanical depth, than by having aggressive star requirements. Leaderboards are dynamic, they adjust as players discover faster and faster strategies, and now that replays are fully integrated into the leaderboard, they actually serve as a valuable in-game teaching tool. If players don't understand how to get a 3-star time on a level, they can just click on a replay from inside the game, and see how someone else did it.
Because of this change, I am planning to loosen some of the 2 and 3 star times on many levels, to make the game more accessible. This is good for a few different reasons:
- Being unable to get 3 stars on levels was demotivating & frustrating for some people.
- Decreasing the variance between the star times means that gate requirements can actually be more strict, since I can expect people to have more stars overall.
- People interested in pushing the game to the limit still have options in the form of the leaderboard and speed run timer.
Changelog
- Tweak leaderboard UI, add background darkening when selecting rows.
- Animated background fade for leaderboard.
- Select the first row in the leaderboard if you were selecting a row, then changed leaderboard type.
- Change leaderboard font weight.
- Clicking leaderboard header will toggle between the different leaderboard display modes.
- Fix Level Quick Select button not closing the menu when clicked.
- Disable commands inside level when selecting leaderboard rows.
- Fixed bug resulting in broken UI when loading a replay from the leaderboard while inside a level.
- Add leaderboard on / off setting to the options menu so you can fully disable it if you want.
- Leaderboards will continue to display whichever leaderboard you viewed last (ex: if you switch to the global leaderboard, that will become the default displayed).
- Fix pause menu not responding to mouse input.
- Update sound setting to default 75% instead of 100%.
- Created a new level Flipping Out to replace What Goes Up... in the demo. What goes up was too big a difficulty spike for new players (it will show up in the final game though).
- Piano changed from level 9 to level 10.
- Update leaderboard generator logging to be more useful / less spammy.
- Update empty leaderboard message to no longer reference "friends".
- Stop goal zone teleport SFX when you skip the teleport animation.
- Teleporter ambient SFX now plays relative to the camera while replays are happening (instead of just permanently playing very loudly).
- Camera is now the SFX listener in replays.
- Show the stop time in replays so you know when they completed.
- Fix pause menu instantly closing when opened with the esc key in replays.
- Replay time text no longer word wraps.
- Replay end time text now uses properly formatted numbers.
- Loading popup now appears above replay list.
- Loading popup now causes the background to dim.
- Fixed bug that caused leaderboard replay downloads to fail if you tried to watch one you just uploaded.
- Fixed bug in options menu where navigating up from reset button would go to the wrong element in some screens.
- Fix bug where jump charge bar would appear in the wrong place for 1 frame.
- Fix bug where jump charge bar would appear active before the player started moving,
- More changes to prevent frozen ragdolls from blocking the camera at the start of the level.
- Import new SFX.
- Added help text tooltip to cannons to aid new players.
- Added new cannon level to tutorialize cannons.
- Fixed bug where character would continuously accelerate due to gravity while inside cannons. (Should also fix some strange behaviors when exiting cannons).
- Updated stats menu so that spacing is better, and it resizes to fit larger numbers / labels.
- Hitting esc on main menu will select the Exit Game button.
- Put replay menu row loading on a background thread. This makes sure there's no delay when opening the replay menu.
- Sliding upward against walls has lower friction.
- Added Steam Rich Presence support.
- Fixed collider on The One Ring that made the level unbeatable.
- Options menu pickers now play slightly different sounds for left and right.
- Game now pauses when the Steam overlay is opened.
