Last Train Outta' Wormtown News

Howdy!

The last two weeks have been crazy! We've seen waves of new players in Wormtown, many hoping to easily find public games together. Unfortunately, Quickplay was just... not a very good solution to this. So I'm excited to announce:

The Lobby Browser is now in game!
When hosting a game, you will see a button in the top left corner that can make the lobby public, allowing it to appear on the lobby browser for people to join. If you want to play with your friends + fill with random players, simply invite your friends and once they're in, make the lobby public.
If you're looking to join a public lobby, you'll find the lobby browser in the "Play" menu where Quickplay used to be.

Note: The lobby browser is not available in the Friend's Pass. If you're looking to try out the game before you buy, you can head over to the Discord, which usually has privately hosted games going!


Another benefit of the huge influx of new players is you all found a bunch of bugs for me to fix! (I'm very tired lol) This patch will hopefully alleviate most of the issues connecting to lobbies - and at least will give you an error pop up explaining why it's happening if not. Most importantly, it shouldn't soft lock your game on the "joining game" screen forever.

Additional lobby features:
- Added the ability to kick players from your lobby as the host.
- Fixed a bug where more than 8 players were able to join a lobby. (While this might sound like a good thing, it caused all sorts of unintended behavior/issues. I've heard feedback about allowing lobbies with more than 8 players, and I'm open to that in the future)
- Added a setting in the options menu for the speed of the map generator. This will hopefully solve crashing issues when the map is building for some players.

Gameplay related bugs/Changes:
- Dynamite now spawns a few at the start of a match, but will then spawn 1 additional dynamite every 60 seconds. This is regardless of how many are currently active on the map. (no more softlocks!)
- Fixed an issue in multi-worm games where other worms could eat your health orbs, trapping you underground.
- Fixed collision on the train "caboose" so the Worm can't dive inside and get stuck.


Now that the lobby browser is in game, I can get back to work on the large gameplay content patch that will feature new Worm abilities and special Pardner equipment items. So keep your eyes on future announcements about that!

As always, feel free to leave feedback either here or in the Discord and thanks so much for the overwhelming support for the game!
Stay safe out there, Pardner! :D
- Vyv

Howdy!

TL:DR - The lobby browser feature is being fast tracked.

The last few days have been crazy! We've seen a huge influx of new players to Wormtown and I wanted to say THANK YOU for checking out the game!
With that huge spike in player count, the planned lobby browser feature (which was planned for sometime this Autumn) feels like a top priority now. I'll be fast tracking the lobby browser and releasing it ASAP. (I'm hoping by the weekend, but I can't make any promises!)


When designing Wormtown, I knew it would be very difficult as a small indie game to maintain player counts needed to keep a matchmaking queue active. So I focused more on making the game a "party" game, and making it as easy as possible to play with your friends (like the friends pass!). I knew there would still be people who would want to hop into public games though, and added the quickplay feature to the game, but in it's current state... Quickplay is just bad.

The quickplay service splits players by region (which is a good thing for ping & lag!), but also doesn't give necessary information to the players waiting in a quickplay lobby - like how many other players are looking for quickplay games etc. It's just not accomplishing it's purpose in the game, which is connecting people together *quickly* for games. So, I've heard your concerns about Quickplay and agree! It will be replaced entirely by the new lobby browser, which will display any open lobbies, player counts and latency to the server.

Thanks again for all the positive feedback on this silly little game of mine
Stay safe out there, Pardner!

I'm excited to announce we've teamed up with Trivia Tricks, the online trivia party game, to bring you the Friend Pass Party Bundle! Both games feature a Friend Pass, where all of your friends can play together with only ONE purchase of the game!

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/33125/Friend_Pass_Party_Bundle/

Owners of Last Train Outta' Wormtown now get a 15% discount on Trivia Tricks through the new Friend Pass Party Bundle. And if you're new to both games, you can get Last Train Outta' Wormtown and Trivia Tricks with the special discounted price - It's the perfect time to get your friends together for game night!



After a grueling session of outsmarting the Worm, prove who's really the smartest Pardner in a game of Trivia Tricks! Trivia Tricks also supports creating and sharing custom questions through the Steam Workshop, making it super easy to customize the game for your specific group.



Check out Trivia Tricks by following this link to the Friend Pass Party Bundle, and thanks for the support!

Next Stop: Trivia Town!

Howdy! I've been hard at work on the biggest Wormtown content patch to date! - but that means I've been a bit radio silent the past two weeks.

Above is the brief roadmap of the content I want to have ready before Wormtown leaves early access later this year. It's a bit vague on some aspects of it, because a lot of my decision making will be a direct result of playtesting and hearing community feedback.

Keep an eye out for the next big content update sometime in the next few weeks (I imagine mid July), which will feature a handful of new Worm abilities and new Pardner "equipment" that will help them battle and survive against the Worm. I'm super excited about how these additions will affect the chaos and variety of each round of Wormtown!

Thanks again for everyone who's checked out Wormtown so far.
Until next time, Keep Wormin' and Squirmin'

Howdy!
A few gameplay additions this update:
* Tumbleweeds now spawn randomly around the map. They roll super well, making them a fantastic worm distraction item. They are a 0 fuel - 1 weight item, so they won't help you much in fueling the train, but may save your life in a pinch!

* Poltergeists!! (spooky!) Ghosts can now throw props short distances. This is on a 45 second cooldown, and can be used in creative ways to help out your fellow Pardners.

* Anti-Tunneling: When escaping a worm's mouth, the minigame difficulty is now drastically reduced for the next 15 seconds. This should help players who are getting focused by the Worms, especially in multi-worm games. Note: the difficulty ramps back up linearly throughout those 15 seconds.

Misc changes:
* Barrels are now worth slightly less fuel. Due to the the change in how they are thrown in the last update, it's now much easier to roll them to the train, so a slight nerf on fuel value seemed needed.
* The "Hard" worm mouth escape mini game now has an additional bubble.
* Reverted the fuse timer of dynamite when in a Worm's mouth. This was inadvertently changed last update. (aka: it goes boom faster)

Bug Fixes:
* Fixed the Pardner tutorial getting stuck on the "connecting" screen in the lobby. (This was only a bug in the Steam build and not in editor - sorry I didn't catch this!)
* Fixed Pardners heart jars not disappearing if they were revived without anyone picking up the heart jar. (Like if a pardner died within the revive zone)


The tumbleweeds and ghost ability add some interesting tweaks to the game, so let me know what you think!

Stay safe out there, Pardner!