Beastieball News

Hello! Firstly, thanks for playing our game :) I am genuinely shocked at how much you all seem to like Beastieball!

[h2]The Experimental Branch[/h2]

I wanted to introduce players to our Experimental branch, which will be the game's home for frequent updates after the initial rush of release bug fixes starts winding down. You can access alternate game branches by Right clicking the game in your Library > Properties > "Betas" tab > Select a branch of the game to subscribe to.

Going forward, our intention will be to patch major content updates to the release build occasionally, but update the experimental branch frequently with whatever we're working on. Sometimes this will mean new Beastie art progress, and sometimes it'll mean experimental mechanic changes or bugfixes that we aren't ready to show everybody yet. We won't always post updates about changes coming to the experimental branch; we'll just keep tinkering on the game there in peace and when there's a lot cool stuff that's built up and well-tested, we'll put it on the release branch and shout about it to everyone.

[h2]Test our new changes![/h2]

Today's experimental update introduces a substantial change to the way the game handles audio which we'd love to have players test. Currently this change is only relevant on PC. In the current experimental branch, audio is loaded and unloaded dynamically as you explore. This means the game startup time is much faster, and the game's overall memory usage is significantly lower, so it should be more stable overall and crash less often.

This also includes an experimental fix for the common slowdown and memory leak associated with completing research on Beasties. This issue does not happen consistently in our testing and has been hard to track down, but we might have fixed it with this build.

We'd love for players to try this version out and let us know whether you're seeing improved results. Our main concern would be whether there are any new audio bugs introduced (sounds missing, longer load times, or other issues).

Thanks for playing!!!!!!

crammed a few more in
- Added another boss option to the post-game expedition challenge
- Made some changes to try and have the game detect Playstation controllers more consistently for showing button prompts. It's supposed to be detecting that but in practice apparently it hasn't been. (I don't have one so I can't test).
- Fixed color palettes for Lunaptras that metamorphed from Humflits
- Reassigned Demolipede's color slots so their health bar is yellow
- Adjusted Fetcham's cheer sounds
- Jellibat metamorphing into Froofulks now gives you max research for Froofulks
- Metamorphing a Beastie in the expedition now does NOT give you research
- Fixed Rail switches activating before the question prompt for them appears
- Fix for Kaz ghosting you in his final rematch if you're not in the post-game yet
- Fix for Celia revoking your Platinum sponsorship if you do story events in a certain order
- Fixed saying "Yes" to Indie's beastiepedia mod being treated as a "no" sometimes
- Fixed crash with broken or missing Beastie relationship data
- Fixed a crash having to do with initiating a cutscene when the player has a team of all very large Beasties (one person reported being stuck at a Dominic rematch from this, sorry!)
- Improved interaction with the "spray ran out" message coming up around other events
- Fixed lingering music from a certain story scene late in the game
- Fixed the player's face being permanently smug after having their raremorph complimented
- Fixed visual positioning issue during some possible outcomes during the final boss
- Better detection for water surfaces under the player's feet
- Alternative door enter/exit anims for sideways doors (there's only one in the game lol)
- More robust safety checks for Beastie plays before going into a match (prevents crashes from bad away team data)
- typos and area adjustments

There are more bugs.... but I have to sleep...

A few fixes and changes to report with this one.
- The Tower Tourney no longer has "hidden information" enabled. This means you can check opponent plays and strategize thusly. This makes it more similar to how players play the rest of the single-player adventure.
- Fixed a couple of memory leaks. This fix will hopefully greatly reduce the number of crashes players get. Most crashes reported at this time come from the game running low on memory. (Relatedly, our Steam analytics show you're all playing this game a LOT / in long sessions... thank you for enjoying it so much)
- Changed model loading to happen on demand rather than all at once on game start. This will slightly reduce memory usage on average and slightly speed up the game's startup time in exchange for levels loading a bit more slowly on your first visit (fractions of seconds). We're doing this in an effort to reduce the game's overall memory usage; there's more we could do but this was an easy first step.
- Changed how the Ball shrooms interact with certain props to hopefully reduce/eliminate the rare issue where the screen goes black after hitting certain things with the ball.
- Crash fix when rejecting Dominic's rematch in the post-game (technically nobody should have been able to see this yet, but we see some of you are editing your calendars...)
- Change to how certain Beastie traits are assigned internally to make traits after metamorphosis more predictable (mostly relevant for the speedrun)
- Fix for one Beastie relationship storyline which was happening to Rivals but was intended for Sweethearts
- A few typos fixed and area layout adjustments

Note that these changes are currently only on PC; Mac will be updated to catch up later.

I don't know who's out there reading these patch notes but if you are, thank you very much for your support. We believed this game was great but we truly did not anticipate just how overwhelmingly positive the response was going to be. Thank you. :)

More things fixed
- MAJOR CRASH FIX on Mac in Geo City areas is now fixed
- All previous fixes are now also on Mac
- Removed debug settings in the options menu which were creating weird bugs
- Some area tweaks and typos
- Re added "[button] for more info" on the new game settings screen, with info for randomizer and ironman modes

More to come...!

This is a hastily-made patch only on PC for now addressing some of the most common and easy to fix issues. We're still working on other fixes!
- Made some tentative changes to some text rendering with the aim of reducing memory use and potentially fixing a slowdown issue that users are reporting when completing research on beasties after playing the game for many hours consecutively. This issue is very hard to reproduce, so we can't be 100% certain it's fixed.
- Adjusted how music timing is counted to more consistently align Rhythm SFX to the beat
- Fixed like 30 typos
- Adjusted layout of several screens to be less janky, better camera, remove areas where player could clip through stuff, etc.
- Fixed colors on raremorph Surgus
- Fixed weird spawn point for one of Riley's hangouts
- Fixed crash when inviting Sunsoo to a hangout when you're already in the expected area
- Fixed an obscure softlock in a hidden boss area

Many more to come. Thank you everyone for playing our game and for the kind reviews!