Beastieball News

Hi there! Here's a summary of changes and fixes that have come over the last couple days.
- Default gamepad inputs for "Tab Right" and "Left" have been adjusted to not overlap with the "clap" buttons
- "Superorganism" Beasties are no longer invincible in Captains mode
- Fixed/added a small scene handling the case where the player loses their very first encounter with Elena
- Updated Petula's Morphology art
- Set more Beasties to be considered "immature" so they can't become Sweethearts
- Entering o or O for a Team Code is now automatically corrected to 0 (team codes cannot contain O's).
- Added more safeguards to prevent softlocks around props that interact infinitely with ball shrooms
- Added safety guards to prevent a few obscure crashes
- Typos and area adjustments
- The details for Ironman Mode previously said that Ironman uses "harder Enemy AI." It would be more accurate to say it uses "different" AI which is better adapted for Ironman gameplay, but the "harder" wording made players erroneously believe that the standard game mode uses "easy" AI, which is not true. This has now been removed from the description to dispel confusion.

Changes for Ironman modes:
- Marlin no longer gives the player additional jerseys if you play the full intro
- Jerseys are now correctly awarded after every boss regardless of which story scene plays
- Fixed the progress blocking issue with a lastgame post-boss scene not clearing correctly
- Beasties on reserve no longer appear in the wild in Ironman mode, so that player's can't wipe out their own Beasties accidentally.
- The Sports King no longer calls you a virgin for playing Ironman mode

These changes are specifically targeted towards speedrunners:
- Transitions between screens can no longer be skipped
- The "Fastest" Sport speed is now a touch faster
- "Scenes" during sport matches can no longer be skipped
- Mashing during sports cannot make animations go any faster than they do at the "Fastest" Sport setting when playing any boss or mini-boss match
- These changes made some scenes unskippable when they should have been skippable; we have corrected those errors to our awareness with the latest patch this evening
These changes reduce the number of inputs required for runners to play optimally, reducing risk of RSI, and improving run watchability.

Lastly for now; we hear players asking for a way to increase the game's challenge and reduce the effects of overlevelling. To that end, there's a new feature in the Experimental branch which players can try out. It's available in the game settings and can be toggled on/off at any time; enjoy and let us know what you think!

I'll continue to fix more issues and monitor incoming feedback. I'm aware of many other issues we haven't addressed yet!

- I have finally and definitively fixed the slowdown caused by completing research on Beasties. This should also also reduce memory issues seen by many users. But definitely not all of them.
- The Beastiepedia now displays whether or not a given Beastie can metamorph
- Infinite interactions with ball shrooms and certain props have been mitigated. This has been the cause for some odd softlocks, endless cutscnees etc in certain areas. We haven't been able to reproduce this issues but we found some ways they MIGHT have been possible and removed those, so, maybe this is all fixed now.
- Dynamic audio loading was added to this build temporarily and then removed. It seems some users have issues with missing audio sometimes with this feature so for now the game will just load all audio on startup.
- Our previous "clean up plays" fix added a new bug to Beasi\ties in postgame challenges who had their moves scrambled sometimes. This has been fixed.
- Added a temp wiggle anim to more Beasties who don't have finished animation yet
- Added ball shrooms to many screens which were previously missing them
- Fixed a softlock that can happen if you reject the Party Pirates match twice
- Some encounters / opponent movesets have been tweaked
- Fixed a 2nd crash related to post-game text with Dominic
- Fixed typos

The Mac version also has been updated with many fixes, namely fixes from previous patches but not yet including fixes above. We have fixed one Mac specific error
- MAC version: fixed mouse getting locked when using body size sliders in character creation

My to-do list is getting longer faster than I can address issues! When we've managed to catch up with the game's worst and most common technical issues, we'll try to pivot towards working on new content and things. Players have reported a lot of obscure areas where the game could use additional dialogue/reactions and we're excited to fill more of those in soon.

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. :)