Patchman vs. Red Circles News

I am very proud to announce the release of DON'T BE PATCHMAN: EPISODE ONE.

What is Episode One? There weren't any episodes before! Well, the game has grown too big, so now there are episodes. Each island is an episode. The first island is Episode One, it's the forest island with Red Drones and the Circle Boss, plus Granny and the House Sheeple. It contains four comic book pages to collect, each with it's own music. There are ten levels, some of them are quite complex. The last level, the circle boss level, has a NEW surprise ending when you beat it!

There are a TON of new features in this release. Procedural generation is a big one! Level Nine is a drone factory maze that changes every time you play it. Many of the levels have what I call "partial" procedural generation, the level as a whole "feels" the same every time you play, but a lot of things are moved around each time, creating a unique experience for every player. Other features that are new include story dialogs, effects level setting, shack menu, swarm levels, drone sight scanners, orange prediction power, poster counts, new music and sound, drone garages, destructive beam machines, shovel tool, stomach UI, joystick hints, and more...

We will continue to provide each episode to our Steam players as part of this Early Access package. When all four islands are complete, it will be spun up into one big package and given a full and Final Release! Now that all the systems of the game are in place, we will be able to roll out the next islands quicker than the first one.

Today it has been released for Linux 64 bit. Linux 32 support has been removed due to Steam removal of that platform. Windows will be next, followed by OSX. We are happy to say we *finally* have a working OSX version! It only has a couple graphics glitches and isn't fully integrated into Steam yet, but worse case it won't have the Steam overlay to start, I'm working on it now tho.

NOTE: This is the EARLY ACCESS release of Episode One. Which is basically like a beta version. Once this game transitions to Release, then Episode One is out of beta as well.

I am very proud to announce the release of DON'T BE PATCHMAN: EPISODE ONE.

What is Episode One? There weren't any episodes before! Well, the game has grown too big, so now there are episodes. Each island is an episode. The first island is Episode One, it's the forest island with Red Drones and the Circle Boss, plus Granny and the House Sheeple. It contains four comic book pages to collect, each with it's own music. There are ten levels, some of them are quite complex. The last level, the circle boss level, has a NEW surprise ending when you beat it!

There are a TON of new features in this release. Procedural generation is a big one! Level Nine is a drone factory maze that changes every time you play it. Many of the levels have what I call "partial" procedural generation, the level as a whole "feels" the same every time you play, but a lot of things are moved around each time, creating a unique experience for every player. Other features that are new include story dialogs, effects level setting, shack menu, swarm levels, drone sight scanners, orange prediction power, poster counts, new music and sound, drone garages, destructive beam machines, shovel tool, stomach UI, joystick hints, and more...

We will continue to provide each episode to our Steam players as part of this Early Access package. When all four islands are complete, it will be spun up into one big package and given a full and Final Release! Now that all the systems of the game are in place, we will be able to roll out the next islands quicker than the first one.

Today it has been released for Linux 64 bit. Linux 32 support has been removed due to Steam removal of that platform. Windows will be next, followed by OSX. We are happy to say we *finally* have a working OSX version! It only has a couple graphics glitches and isn't fully integrated into Steam yet, but worse case it won't have the Steam overlay to start, I'm working on it now tho.

NOTE: This is the EARLY ACCESS release of Episode One. Which is basically like a beta version. Once this game transitions to Release, then Episode One is out of beta as well.

We've rolled out Version 0.5 of our game!

This includes a LOT of new content and features,
including seven comic book pages and a new main menu.
There are still a ton of features waiting to
be deployed that are used in later levels.



Patchman is no longer a SteamOS/Linux exclusive.
While we were the first to do so, we're no longer
the only one. We're passing the torch along
to another game, will anyone else take it?

KNOWN ISSUES:
- Sometimes the Back button the Comics stops working
- Sometimes respawn on Easy/Medium for Level 5 crashes
- Hints are a bit quirky or not optimal sometimes
We've issued fixes for these but aren't 100% sure they are solved.

LINUX RELEASE NOTES:
- If you are on Linux and experience troubles launching after upgrade,
please uninstall and reinstall.

Cheers and Don't Be Patchman!

We've rolled out Version 0.5 of our game!

This includes a LOT of new content and features,
including seven comic book pages and a new main menu.
There are still a ton of features waiting to
be deployed that are used in later levels.



Patchman is no longer a SteamOS/Linux exclusive.
While we were the first to do so, we're no longer
the only one. We're passing the torch along
to another game, will anyone else take it?

KNOWN ISSUES:
- Sometimes the Back button the Comics stops working
- Sometimes respawn on Easy/Medium for Level 5 crashes
- Hints are a bit quirky or not optimal sometimes
We've issued fixes for these but aren't 100% sure they are solved.

LINUX RELEASE NOTES:
- If you are on Linux and experience troubles launching after upgrade,
please uninstall and reinstall.

Cheers and Don't Be Patchman!

It was always a hope to add animated cutscenes into the game. At one point I (developer Dave) had taken inspiration from Super Meat Boy and tried my hand at animating a scene using Synfig (an opensource Flash-like tool). That didn't work out well enough to go forward.

Karly MacDonald was asked to try her hand at a cutscene. She successfully created a test scene and I successfully integrated it into the engine, displaying it before Level 5 (factory boss fight). This scene never shipped with the Early Alpha tho, because I didn't want players to expect more of them until I knew for sure we could commit to them. While Karly did her job, the remaining scenes were canceled due to the looming unaffordable expense. You can see a video of it here:

https://youtu.be/D5AEZtKtJTQ

The cutscene worked, but the effort involved in just this little scene would have to be multiplied many times over to get a real story going.



So... no cutscenes possible, but did we give up? No! Another approach was conjured up! What if we told the story in another fashion, instead of animated, we could have a series of pages and panels?

Ihor and I sat down over a series of meetings and discussed the feasibility of this plan. We decided we could do 10 pages over a course of two months, and thus we started on it. Ihor created an interested test page set to the pace of his own music:

Then Dave started storyboarding, which was far more difficult and agonizing than anticipated. It took a month of on/off sketching to get a semi-acceptable storyboard. Even then, we changed and tweaked the storyboard as we went and decided to add more pages to flesh out the story a bit more. Finally we ended up with a 15 page comic book that we have finished this week!





As you move Patchman about the game world, you have the opportunity to find each page of the comic book, collect them, and complete the entire set.



You may be thinking: "But don't I already know the whole story of Patchman? Didn't you write it out?" Yes, you know the gist of it, but not the details, and what's more important, you don't know the source of the whole plan behind the Drones and control of the Sheeple, the origin of Patchman, and more epic plot twists that we won't even hint at here.

As you collect the final pages, the story will tie together, bits and pieces of the game you may have thought were trivial take on relevance, and the full meaning behind the title of the game will make sense.

Furthermore, the comic is only what happened BEFORE the game takes place. So there are more surprises in store as you continue on through the game, including the ending(s).





And yet through all this there are no words in the game beyond the title screen and some explanatory menu labels. These are all available for translation to Unicode languages. We did experiment with adding captions to the comics, and we'll leave those as an Easter egg that you can enable by entering a secret code. These can also be translated to other languages.

It has been extremely challenging to craft a game and story without using any words or sentences! We even worry if this will impact the game negatively, but it's one of the early artistic choices we made, and think it leaves room for contemplation and interpretation of the events. Also, after testing and receiving feedback for the comic, a fair share of people complained about the poorly written dialog, and a high majority agreed that the words weren't necessary as the pictures were enough to get the plot points across.



We still have a lot of work left to complete levels, bosses, integrate more art, endings, special effects, and sound. But we are getting so close to the end and release! "When exactly" is hard to predict as our lead/sole programmer Dave has limited time to work on this (not by choice). There are countless new features just waited to be shipped and played with...