Tango Fiesta News

...D'you think we're f****** stupid, Hans?

This week we've been hard at work adding baddies to boss fights, attending the Loading Bar's 5th birthday party (we share the same birth-month!) and also a sneak peek at a LOT of zombies in Tango...

Here's this week's video diary to see for yourself what we've been up to:

https://youtu.be/_92lLBhpgjA

...we’ve not put a public update up on Steam though, as we spotted some pretty nasty framerate drops during the game’s demo-ing at Loading Bar, so we want to fix that before we get the latest build out to the paying public!

We also added some playable characters based on Loading bar’s staff, combined with famous action heroes. We think they went down well!









We’ll most likely leave them in once we launch the Steam Workshop feature... I think they’re rather ace! From top to bottom we’ve got Alice Ripley, Lucy 2000, Jack Burtom and Jimmy McDance

But yeah, all of this is a good illustration of why we like go to so many events - they’re a great test outside of the relatively closed and calm environment we’re used to as devs. Not only did we spot unexpected bugs we want to fix before they land on you guys and gals, but we got to test out functionality (the Steam Workshop character stuff) more thoroughly, while having a bit of fun doing it.

Till next week! Toodles!

“We don’t make things complicated. That’s the way they get, all by themselves.”

We’ve been working hard on so much stuff it’s hard to keep track of. This one’s gonna be a doozy! We’re keen to try and stay regular, but I doubt we’ll be doing weekly updates. Fortnightly seems much more sensible. We get to really wrap features up, and you get better quality each time we update. Of course we’ll respond swiftly to really nasty bugs we find, but other than that, you get what we mean.

So the biggest single change is our new HUD! Check it out...

Check out all of the new stuff!

We’ve got:

Hit Flash: The player portrait flashes red every time you’re hit now, which we find, out of the corner of your eye, really helps communicate better when you’re taking damage.

Ammo Counter: Obviously every hero needs to know how much ammo he’s got left in his equipped gun!

Equipped Weapon Indicator: And what hero would be able to perform his heroic duties if he couldn’t tell what gun he’d got equipped in the first place?

Grenade Counter: If you’re going to throw high explosives around, it’s always good to know how many throws you’ve got left to take out that coconut stand.

Cash Counter: It’s all about the money, innit.

Combo Counter: Combos you say? Hell yeah, more details below...

Score Counter: We’ve now broken down the score you’re registering with each kill, and display it under your hud

Damage-taken-indication: Your health bar now only looks nicer, we’ve taken the liberty of showing you, on each hit, how much damage you just took. Makes it easier to learn which enemies to try harder to kill! It displays in yellow, and fades after a second or two. You know the drill.

Low Health Indication: Your character’s portrait will pulse red continuously when your health is less than 33%. Bit of a reference to Zelda, but without the annoying chime noise.

Stamina Indicator: Essentially unchanged, but nicer looking.

New Portrait Art: Way nicer looking than before! It’s in there for every character.


So, as promised above, here’s the lowdown on our new scoring & combo system!

Hot pink score popups were a no-brainer.

You’ve always been given scores for kills, but now we’re improving the system.

If you kill a bad guy, the game registers that, and if you kill two more before a three second timer has elapsed, and you’ll add one to the multiplier, and all subsequent kills will be worth double (or triple, or even more). The game counts down that timer, and at zero seconds the multiplier is reset.

You can stop that happening by registering another kill (which resets it to three seconds of course), but you can also pause the countdown briefly by registering damage on both enemies and terrain.

Basically we want to capture more of that 80’s action hero essence. We all know how freely they give out their bullets, and how much they revel in wanton destruction - so to encourage people to keep their fingers on the trigger no matter what, this fun solution was designed and implemented.

Here’s the thing - the highest we’ve been able to get is Combo x6. See if you can do better! Protip: try juggling damage on Champions with kills on lesser enemies while you whittle their health down.

Note: some bad guys aren’t given a value yet as we’re still balancing, but we wanted to get his out to you sooner rather than later, and see the leaderboards hot up with some action! I don’t think any of the Ghost or Zombies have scores associated, nor do Radio Guys and Heavy Guys. You’ve been warned ;)

So those are the big additions since the last update, but here’s the full list for your delectation!




Combo system.
Scoring system with Hot Pink score popups.
New HUD for all characters and player slots.
Damage flash now applied to HUD portrait when player takes damage.
HUD portrait pulses red if player is at less than 33% health.
Players can now bind all extra controllers (up to 4).
New Input Controller system means Local Co-op players can now hotswap controllers, disconnect, reconnect and connect while the game is running, and the game will be fine with that.
Crosshair added to mouse pointer for keyboard and mouse players. Turns red & shakes when firing, stops shaking when you’re out of ammo/need to reload.
Brand new pause menu, much nicer, simpler to navigate, and gives access to controls screen too.


Fixed multiple player controls.
Fixed Yatcha movement sound playing after her death.
Fixed input binding systems in settings - you can no longer bind a gamepad if it is not connected.
Players should be able to interact with every single screen and every single function with pad, keyboard or mouse, alone or in any combination.
Password entry refreshing the lobby when R key is pressed.
Fixed bug where you could bypass a password game entry by double clicking on a game.


Updated the join-in-progress character stat panels to be localisation-proof. Icons instead of text for Health, Speed, Accuracy & Stamina.
When joining into single player or local co-op, game now auto-joins whichever input was detected to send game into that menu.
We’ve added a big, chunky and way cooler new boss health bar to all boss fights.
Tree death sfx changed to be less explosion-y.

Finally, following on from the last update, here’s an expanded look at the almost-full-cast of Tango Fiesta. We’ve vastly improved the story in Tango this week - mainly by allowing players to skip straight to the action (ie: ignoring the story if they want) and also with a new command that allows us to edit the delivery of the story with a bit more intent making it snappier, funnier and generally a bit more smooth. Alas, it is still ‘off’ for Early Access and likely will be till full release, but I like to show what we’ve been doing from all angles.

Nearly all of our colourful cast, both friend and foe!

What are we up to next? Well, we’re continuing to improve performance - we know some people will see some framerate hits with this update, and we’re working on finding out the solution - but we’re also going to be improving the AI, the Shop, and the Boss Fights over the coming days and weeks.

Don’t expect an update next week, though, as GDC is on and frankly our coder is in San Francisco networking and doing business stuff. plus this way we get to save up for another bigger update next time!

Ta-ra for now, chucks!

The Spilt Milk team

We’re back! It’s been a long, slow 4 or 5 weeks since the last update. We had a great time in the rollercoaster of sales that is the Humble Bundle last month - thank you so much to everyone who spent any money in there, it went to some great causes - but we have to keep on making Tango Fiesta better and better because, well, nobody else is going to are they?

We've taken so long because we’ve had to focus a LOT on localisation and Steam Workshop Support. Neither of which are in this update. Well they are, but they’re switched off cos they’re not 10% ready yet. That’s the bad news.

The good news is we’ve also been spending the time fixing lots of annoying bugs, performance issues and all kinds of issues with the game, so with any luck it should be obvious how much better it plays.

This should mark our return to slightly more regular public updates too, all the way up until we go ‘gold’!

MOST - but not all - of the characters you’ll meet while playing Tango’s story mode!




- Touch damage: now all enemies (other than bosses) do damage to the player on touch.
- Weapons graphics finalised and updated for all guns, characters & situations.
- 1-off rooms added. If placed by the system, this room will be removed from the pool of place-able rooms for the next 3 levels.


- Let Off Some Steam now uses the correct number of enemies to assign to ActiveEnemyCount
- Improved Recycling checks on dead/recycled enemies
- Fixed major inter-world lag issue once going through weapon select
- Fixed Helicopters not attacking you
- Mission results labels now respond to mouse click
- Fixed bug in CameraScroller which was crashing the game if there was a chopper in x-3, you completed a boss fight, then loaded y-1 with no choppers
- Fixed bug where bushes would be destroyed but not disappear
- Environment sounds stop on mission results
- You can now purchase weapons with keyboard controls
- Fixed Cancel button bug in character select
- Fixed a bunch of audio errors
- Fixed weapon and impact knockback (now all impacts go in correct -direction)
- Fixed teleport bug in pause menu
- Pickups no longer time-dilate when game is paused
- Rigid-body physics removed from enemies on death to prevent post mortem movement
- Fixed guttering in Host Game and Lobby
- Optimised achievement saving calls
- Bullets now have their renderer turned on by default when being re-used -
- Fixed parachute displaying in front of player characters on spawn
- Fixed parachute being displayed on the ground at the player spawn location during subsequent missions
- Fixed Chopper objective Hovering Audio persisting between game sessions.
- Fixed General Payne noy dying/moving
- Fixed Randomisation of Stalkers in Killionaire boss fight
- Fixed Old Ramishar's health phase issues
- Fix for not being killed by boss during Ramishar boss fight
- Fixed the games front end logo sheen animation


- Moved Shutdown savefile routine to before the SteamSDK gets shut down
- Performance updates with Interval Manager
- Performance updates with the pathfinding
- Performance updates with Old Ramishar boss fight
- Reduced spawn radius for choppers
- Optimised location find for valid spawn points
- Updated Running Man boss music
- Updated Commando boss music
- Updated Commando level music layers
- Added pooling for Death Hits, reducing performance overhead
- When breaking out of intro splash, it remains on splash instead of going to main menu
- Yatcha Queen has slightly less health
- Killionaire’s mini flamers have their lifespan reduced (shorter range)
- Killionaire’s chainsaw guys are now slightly slower
- Player shadow now darker
- Neutron Napsack doing 3x the previous damage
- Sped up Yatcha Queen between phases
- Updated parachute graphic
- Changed the area which you can initiate a ‘hack’ to all around the Radio Mast
- Changed ‘reloading’ prompt to display only when the player is reloading.
- Reduced Jungle-1 objectives on first playthrough to 1 radio tower and 1 spawn hut
- Bullet Pooling now keeps performance way better
- Trees in Island health reduced to 150 to match those in Jungles.

Like I said at the top, this list isn’t comprehensive - it’s not a school report of everything we’ve been doing - but rather this is what you’ll be able to see reflected in the latest update. Rest assured that all of our work on localisation, story mode, character portraits and of course the Steam Workshop support that’ll allow you to create, share and play with your own heroes (for the love of all that is Arnie I can't wait to see what you guys and gals come up with) will all be coming down the line very soon!

Reassuringly back and productively yours,

The Spilt Milk team

We’re in the Humble Weekly Bundle!



We’ve taken this opportunity to upload some fixes, mainly to the online play. We don’t want all the new players to get annoyed at bugs and stuff, so even though obviously we’re still in Early Access, we’ve been trying to make a good impression.

We’re hopefully going to get another update with more bug fixes and polish next week, but who knows. not a promise, just a statement of intent :D

Without further ado, here are some lovely bits of art to make everyone want to play our game more!

Alternative poster!

John Strong, Miller & bionic Cop going commando in Operation Sea Shell!

John Strong - the only predator worth worrying about in Jungle!

Conchita kicking ass and proving her innocence in Who Wants To Be A Killionaire!

John Strong busting some ghosts in Ghoul Squad!




- ‘Press R to refresh’ prompt now back in the Server Browser for clients
- massive optimisation on performance/framerate, involving some culling of tiles and fewer enemy spawn attempts per second
- online play not a lot more reliable
- host players now able to properly (and more reliably) name and set up games

If you’ve read this far, here’s a fun little glimpse behind the curtain...

You know we’re serious about Early Access when we proudly share brand new bugs like this! Some kind of holiday location seems to generate when Jungle and Island worlds cross their streams...

Humbly, bundly yours,

The Spilt Milk team

YES!

We've uploaded a new version of Tango Fiesta to Steam, and rather than all the usual rubbish I blather here, I'll cut to the chase:

- TONS of improvements across the board
- a few new bugs
- MAC VERSION SHOULD WORK GREAT NOW
- the end



See you after all the festivities!

Oh alright, for those of you who really care, here's the (nearly) full changelog! :D



- Core achievements added, unlocks to be implemented
- localisation added for Russian, English, French and German (functionality to be unlocked)
- Credits added to the Settings menu
- Workshop functionality implemented, no front end yet, functionality currently hidden.
- New Bionic Cop world, currently locked.
- Added greater functionality to props, including new properties
- New animation system for props added
- Huge number of new prop and sprite animations added to every level
- 20 new rooms added to level gen for Coastal
- 6 new rooms added to level gen for Ghoul Squad


- Mac build should now progress past Character Select Menu
- objective placement with level generation reoptomised and ensured that there is always an objective
- Fixed problem with room placement event weightings
- Fixed issues with text resizing
- Fixed issues with the game completing a mission before starting, if controls are pressed during the loading screen.


- Updates to all music tracks
- Big update to a large number of sound effects
- New sound effects for a lot of interactions (bullets hitting wood, concrete etc). All very work in progress.
- Optimised room placement collision algorithm.
- Big art update on a number of sprites and menu ui
- General optimisation on game play flow.


Merry Christmas!